Ground Roll Attenuation of Multicomponent Seismic Data with the Noise-Assisted Multivariate Empirical Mode Decomposition (NA-MEMD) Method

Multicomponent seismic exploration provides more wavefield information for imaging complex subsurface structures and predicting reservoirs. Ground roll is strongly coherent noise in land multicomponent seismic data and exhibits similar features, which are strong energy, low frequency, low velocity and dispersion, in each component. Ground roll attenuation is an important step in seismic data processing. In this study, we utilized multivariate empirical mode decomposition to multicomponent seismic data for attenuating ground roll. By adding extra components containing independent white noise, noise-assisted multivariate empirical mode decomposition is adopted to overcome the mode-mixing effect in standard empirical mode decomposition. This method provides a more robust analysis than the standard empirical mode decomposition EMD method performed separately for each component. Multicomponent seismic data are decomposed into different intrinsic mode functions in frequency scale. According to different frequency scales of seismic reflection wave and ground roll, intrinsic mode functions with low frequency are eliminated to suppress ground roll, and the remaining are reconstructed for seismic reflection waves. Synthetic and field data tests show that the proposed approach performs better than the traditional attenuation method.