A feasibility study for the application of seismic interferometry by multidimensional deconvolution for lithospheric-scale imaging

Active-source surveys are widely used for the delineation of hydrocarbon accumulations. Most source and receiverconfigurations are designed to illuminate the first 5 km of the earth. For a deep understanding of the evolutionof the crust, much larger depths need to be illuminated. The use of large-scale active surveys is feasible, butrather costly. As an alternative, we use passive acquisition configurations, aiming at detecting responses fromdistant earthquakes, in combination with seismic interferometry (SI). SI refers to the principle of generatingnew seismic responses by combining seismic observations at different receiver locations. We apply SI to theearthquake responses to obtain responses as if there was a source at each receiver position in the receiver array.These responses are subsequently migrated to obtain an image of the lithosphere.Conventionally, SI is applied by a crosscorrelation of responses. Recently, an alternative implementation wasproposed as SI by multidimensional deconvolution (MDD) (Wapenaar et al. 2008). SI by MDD compensatesboth for the source-sampling and the source wavelet irregularities. Another advantage is that the MDD relationalso holds for media with severe anelastic losses. A severe restriction though for the implementation of MDDwas the need to estimate responses without free-surface interaction, from the earthquake responses. To mitigatethis restriction, Groenestijn en Verschuur (2009) proposed to introduce the incident wavefield as an additionalunknown in the inversion process. As an alternative solution, van der Neut et al. (2010) showed that the requiredwavefield separation may be implemented after a crosscorrelation step. These last two approaches facilitate theapplication of MDD for lithospheric-scale imaging.In this work, we study the feasibility for the implementation of MDD when considering teleseismic wavefields. Weaddress specific problems for teleseismic wavefields, such as long and complicated source wavelets, source-sidereverberations and illumination gaps. We exemplify the feasibility of SI by MDD on synthetic data, based on fielddata from the Laramie and the POLARIS-MIT array.van Groenestijn, G.J.A. & Verschuur, D.J., 2009. Estimation of primaries by sparse inversion from passiveseismic data, Expanded abstracts, 1597-1601, SEG.van der Neut, J.R, Ruigrok, E.N., Draganov, D.S., & Wapenaar, K., 2010. Retrieving the earth’s reflectionresponse by multi-dimensional deconvolution of ambient seismic noise, Extended abstracts, submitted, EAGE.Wapenaar, K., van der Neut, J., & Ruigrok, E.N., 2008. Passive seismic interferometry by multidimensionaldeconvolution, Geophysics, 75, A51-A56.