Reverse Time Migration of Multiples: Applications and Challenges

Marine seismic acquisitions record both primary and multiple wavefields. In a typical processing sequence, multiple energy is removed from the data before migration. However, there may be valuable information contained in the multiple wavefield. To discover this hidden information, reverse time migration of multiples (RTMM) was proposed. We evaluated the advantages of RTMM through three different real data processing projects and identified three key advantages. Additionally, we present a synthetic study of two types of crosstalk noise that hinder the full potential of RTMM as well as propose corresponding practical strategies to handle them.