Abstract
Sea surface profile and reflection coefficient estimates are vital input parameters to various
seismic data processing applications. The common assumption of a flat sea surface when
processing seismic data can lead to misinterpretations and mislocations of events. A new
method of imaging the sea surface from decomposed wavefields is presented. Wavefield
separation is applied to the data acquired by a towed dual sensor streamer containing
collocated hydrophones and geophones to obtain the up- and down-going wavefields of the
related sensors. The up- and down-going wavefields of a given sensor are extrapolated to the
sea surface where an imaging condition is applied in order to obtain the sea surface profile.
The image points values obtained at the sea surface are the reflection coefficient values of
these points. Ray tracing and finite difference methods are used to generate different
controlled data sets employed in this feasibility study to demonstrate the imaging principle
and to test the image accuracy. Finally, a first field data example of a marginal weather line
from the Norwegian North-Sea is presented.