Summary

A new method is introduced for eliminating all surface related multiples in both acoustic and elastic media. This pre-stack multiple elimination procedure does m require any knowledge about the subsurface structure but only about the reflection characteristics at the surface and the source wave field. The procedure is carried out in the space-frequency domain and can therefore handle data from laterally inhomogeneous ubsurfaces. The multiple elimination method is based on the wave equation. The main characteristic is the fact that the data itself is used as an multiple prediction operator. This in contrary to other wave equation based multiple suppressing schemes which assume a subsurface model and generate this operator in a synthetic way. The main operations in the algorithm are matrix multiplications, which makes it very suitable for vector computers. In the case of elastic data (multi component recording) a decomposition is applied to acquire true P and S wave responses. After this decomposition converted multiples can be handled as well. Applying this multiple elimination procedure on synthetic data, both acoustic and elastic, yields good results