Journal of Geophysics and Engineering

Journal of Geophysics and Engineering (2021) 18, 492–502 https://doi.org/10.1093/jge/gxab024

A review of OBN processing: challenges and

solutions
Dongliang Zhang1, *, Constantinos Tsingas1 , Ahmed A Ghamdi2 , Mingzhong Huang2 , Woodon Jeong 1
,
Krzysztof K. Sliz2 , Saud M Aldeghaither2 and Saeed A. Zahrani2

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1
EXPEC Advanced Research Center, Saudi Aramco, Dhahran 31311, Saudi Arabia
2
Geophysical Imaging Department, Saudi Aramco, Dhahran 31311, Saudi Arabia

*Corresponding author: E-mail: [email protected]

Received 13 March 2021, revised 9 May 2021

Accepted for publication 31 May 2021

Abstract
In the last decade, a significant shift in the marine seismic acquisition business has been made
where ocean bottom nodes gained a substantial market share from streamer cable configurations.
Ocean bottom node acquisition (OBN) can acquire wide azimuth seismic data over geographical
areas with challenging deep and shallow bathymetries and complex subsurface regimes. When
the water bottom is rugose and has significant elevation differences, OBN data processing faces a
number of challenges, such as denoising of the vertical geophone, accurate wavefield separation,
redatuming the sparse receiver nodes from ocean bottom to sea level and multiple attenuation. In
this work, we review a number of challenges using real OBN data illustrations. We demonstrate
corresponding solutions using processing workflows comprising denoising the vertical
geophones by using all four recorded nodal components, cross-ghosting the data or using direct
wave to design calibration filters for up- and down-going wavefield separation, performing
one-dimensional reversible redatuming for stacking QC and multiple prediction, and designing
cascaded model and data-driven multiple elimination applications. The optimum combination of
the mentioned technologies produced cleaner and high-resolution migration images mitigating
the risk of false interpretations.
Keywords: OBN data processing, redatuming, up/down wavefield separation, demultiple

1. Introduction ing in a relatively quiet environment and without effects from

water waves and noise produced by adjacent boats, the possi-
As offshore reservoir targets become more complex, we seek
bility to record four-component data, longer periods of repet-
acquisition solutions and technologies that illuminate the
itive recording at the same position and more flexible field
subsurface by using field configurations exhibiting wide re-
geometries (Detomo et al. 2012).
flection angles and having rich and uniform azimuth distribu-
The main challenge of processing of OBN data is its
tions. Ocean bottom node acquisition (OBN) is one of the
unique acquisition geometry. Here we will demonstrate
technologies used to assist in deep marine exploration and
processing technologies that have been applied to a recently
development. It has allowed seismic acquisition over areas
acquired high density, large and full azimuth 3D OBN sur-
with islands and more complex shallow and deep bathymetry.
vey (Alghamdi et al. 2018; Zhang & Tsingas 2019; Zhang
Compared to conventional streamer acquisition, OBN acqui-
et al. 2020a, 2020b). These OBN data were acquired in
sition has several advantages, such as the ability to record a
an extreme complex marine environment where the water
wider azimuth, higher quality of seismic data due to record-
bottom’s elevation was changing rapidly, namely from above

492 © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Sinopec Geophysical Research Institute. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of
the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly cited.
Journal of Geophysics and Engineering (2021) 18, 492–502 Zhang et al.

sea level (small islands with shallow surface relief) to around 3. Seismic data processing
1000 m deep in the water column. For this dataset, the main New challenges for seismic data processing are introduced
challenges and subsequent solutions can be categorised with OBN seismic acquisition. The sparse receiver and dense
according to the following critical steps. (i) Denoising of the source spatial samplings limit processing to the common re-
vertical geophone gathers due to shear wave contamination ceiver domain because of relatively dense source-side sam-
using a least-squares approach by using all four recorded pling (50 × 50 m). The full processing work flow is shown
components. The subsequent PZ summation using the in figure 2. It first addresses the different level of energy
denoised P and Z components, not only effectively sepa- emitted from different seismic sources by deriving constant
rates up- and down-going wavefields but also eliminates the scalars using the averaged RMS amplitudes to bring the en-
effects of the receiver side multiples. (ii) Redatuming of ergy of all sources to a consistent level. The matching filters
the seabed receivers to the sea surface provides a fast and and debubble were used to adjust all sources to the level of
reversible application for stack related QCs and also gen- the deepest source (7 m) that contributes more than 60% of
erates an unaliased dataset that can be used for processing the whole survey. Noise attenuation was applied to the ver-
specific applications requiring both sources and receivers

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tical geophone before PZ summation to separate wavefields
at the sea surface. (iii) Demultiple methodologies based into up- and down-going waves. After PZ summation, the
on models or that are data driven are used to attenuate data recorded by nodes located on islands were merged into
both surface- and interbed-related multiples. In fact, we will both up- and down-going waves. Surface consistent ampli-
demonstrate that a cascaded processing workflow combining tude correction and surface consistent deconvolution correc-
the two domains provides an optimum and most effective tion were followed to deliver the first version of processed
solution. data for fast-track pre-stack depth migration (PSDM) as well
This case study is organised as follows: first, we briefly de- as for the multiple prediction and elimination flows. A sec-
scribe the acquisition geometry of the 3D OBN survey. Next, ond version of processed data with multiple attenuation in-
we demonstrate the challenges and solutions of key process- cluding surface-related multiple elimination (SRME) and in-
ing technologies using a real 3D OBN data set. Finally, in con- ternal multiple elimination in the pre-stack domain was later
clusion, we discuss the effectiveness and significance of each delivered for final PSDM processing.
of the applied technologies. In the following sections, the main challenges in OBN
data processing will be discussed: namely, vertical geophone
component denoising from the contaminated shear wave
crosstalk using all four components, up/down wavefield sep-
2. Survey design aration, up- and down-going wavefield redatuming and mul-
tiple attenuation in data and image domains.
The survey was acquired in a rugose seabed bathymetry with
highly complex subsurface geology. The survey area was ap-
proximately 632 km2 , which covered islands (100 m above
3.1. 4C denoising and up-going and down-going wavefield
sea level) and deep-water areas with depths greater than 1000
separation
m. To adjust to variable bathymetry, three different source
vessels were used with different source depths of 2, 5 and 7 m To capitalise in the OBN field acquisition configuration
and with different total airgun volumes and energy strengths. we need to develop robust and innovative data process-
In this field environment, different types of seismic sensor ing technologies to obtain high-resolution broad band im-
were used, namely marine 4C nodes and land vertical geo- ages. PZ summation is a critical process to separate up-going
phones. To accommodate for a limited number of nodes, a and down-going wavefields required for further processing
sparser geometry was used for receivers (100 × 300 m) stages. The theoretical formulation of PZ summation of dual
with dense carpet shooting geometry for shots sensors (hydrophone and vertical geophone) was explained
(50 × 50 m) respectively. This acquisition geometry al- by Barr & Sanders (1989). An algorithm based on Soubaras
lowed a maximum offset of 19 km in the inline direction (1999) was used for this dataset by estimating a filter that at-
and 8 km in the crossline direction. The typical life-cycle tempts to match the hydrophone with the vertical geophone
of the node battery is 40 days and in this case, nodes were response to solve the problem of variations in water bottom
left in the seabed for slightly more than 30 days. Acquisition reflectivity, and in instrument response by poor coupling.
field attributes of water depth below sources and receiver It can be decomposed into three steps, (i) calibration, (ii)
depths, depth of source and corresponding fold are shown in deghosting and (iii) pegleg removal, as follows:
figure 1, respectively. The large variation in the ocean bottom
and the combination of marine and land acquisition made
the data processing very challenging. 2U = H + fc G, (1)

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Figure 1. Field attribute maps: (a) water depth below sources, (b) water depth at receivers, (c) source depth and (d) fold map (modified from Alghamdi
et al. 2018).

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Figure 2. Generic processing workflow of OBN data.

2D = H − fc G, (2) data with a high signal-to-noise ratio. First, using the follow-
ing equations calculates cross-ghosted hydrophone (H′ ) and
U1 = U + fp D, (3) geophone (G′ ) data:

where, the terms U and D represent the up- and down-going

wavefields just above the ocean bottom, and U1 is the up- H′ = (1 + Z)H, (4)
going wavefield just below the ocean bottom. The terms H
and G are the hydrophone and vertical geophone wavefields, G′ = (1 − Z)G, (5)
respectively. A least-squares based matching filter was applied
to calculate the coefficients of fc for calibration and the reflec- where Z is an operator indicating two-way vertical travel in
tion filter coefficients fp for de-pegleg (Barr & Sanders 1989; the water layer. After cross-ghosting, the hydrophone and
Soubaras 1996, 1999; Muijs et al. 2004). The up-going wave- geophone data have the same phase but different amplitudes.
field after PZ summation is supposed to be free of receiver A calibration filter is then derived by minimising the differ-
side pegleg multiples. Two ways were selected to design the ence between the cross-ghosted hydrophone and geophone
calibration filter fp to remove this pegleg multiples. One uses components. Alternatively, a data window centered on the di-
windowed reflection data in pre-stack or stacked rect wave is used to calculate the calibration filter. Using this

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3.2. Redatuming
Due to OBN’s field geometry configuration, ray paths
between sources and receivers exhibit asymmetric charac-
teristics. Therefore, a redatuming application needs to be
performed so that we can apply regular CMP based time pro-
cessing and QCs. Consequently, a 1D redatuming algorithm
was developed to accommodate the variable shot and re-
ceiver field geometry for both the up- and down-going wave-
fields to generate QC stacks. Since 1D redatuming considers
the vertical shift and moveout variation it has no aliasing
issues for sparse OBN survey. Therefore, it avoids an exten-
sive multi-dimensional data interpolation/regularisation for
wave-based forward/backward continuation methodologies

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and can significantly reduce turnaround time. The theory
of 1D redatuming is illustrated in figure 5, where two ray
paths represent traveltime from and back to the surface (sr2 ),
and from the surface to the water bottom (sr1 ). The source
location is indicated by s. Receivers are located on the ocean
bottom and the sea level represented by r1 and r2 and their
corresponding mirror locations are indicated by r1′ and r2′ ,
respectively. The travel times tsr1 and tsr2 for the up-going
waves can be expressed as
Figure 3. Workflow of denoising for vertical geophone using all four h2
components.
tsr2 = t01
2
+ , (6)
1
v21
h2
calibration filter, the deghosting and the pegleg removal are tsr2 = t02
2
+ , (7)
2
v22
done simultaneously in one step.
where h is the offset from the receiver to source. The two-way
The pre-conditioning of the two component OBN seis-
travel times t01 and t02 at the zero offset where receivers are
mic data before summation is a necessary step for both hy-
located at the ocean bottom and at sea level, respectively, are
drophone and vertical geophone components. To remove
related according to
the shear wave leakage from the vertical geophone compo-
nents, a denoise methodology developed by Jeong and Tsin- t02 = t01 + tw , (8)
gas (2019) using all four components was used. Figure 3 de- where tw is the one-way travel time within the water layer.
picts a methodology that uses two masking filters and adap- The traveltime equation (6) implies that the traveltime curve
tive subtractions to eliminate the undesirable shear waves is still a hyperbola for the situation of the shot and receiver at
in the vertical geophone component (Wang 2003; Rao & different depth levels. Therefore, NMO still holds for OBN
Wang 2016). Then, a signal envelope matching filter adjusts acquisition. Obviously, stacking velocities for these two
the amplitudes of the denoised traces to match the ampli- acquisitions are different and their relationship is as follows
tudes of the hydrophone component. It provides a better and
consistent calibration of the hydrophone and vertical geo- v2 (t02 ) = v1 (t01 ). (9)
phone components before the application of PZ summation. Because travel times t01 and t02 correspond to the same
Figure 4 parts a–d show common receiver gathers of four reflector, the stacking velocities at these two times should be
components OBN data, namely the hydrophone, vertical, ra- the same. In practice, these two stacking velocities are close
dial and transverse geophones. Without denoising, the sepa- when the depth velocity increases slowly with depth. We can
rated up- and down-going waves are contaminated by strong use one stacking velocity for this situation, otherwise differ-
shear waves as shown in figure 4f and g. The denoised vertical ent stacking velocities need be adapted. An initial v1 and v2
geophone (figure 4e) removes most of the shear wave energy. can be obtained by NMO velocity analysis on the dataset
This data set becomes similar to the hydrophone data so that at the ocean bottom and vertical water-layer shifted dataset
the computed calibration filter during the PZ summation will at sea level, respectively. Alternatively, one of v1 and v2 can
become more consistent. PZ summation applied on the hy- be converted from the other according to equation (9). The
drophone and the denoised vertical geophone components workflow of 1D redatuming is composed of three steps:
significantly improves up- and down-going wavefield separa- (i) applying NMO with the stacking velocity, (ii) vertically
tion as shown in figure 4h and i compared with figure 4f and g. shifting traces from the ocean bottom to the sea level using
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Figure 4. Denoised common receiver gathers using all four components. (a) Hydrophone gather, (b) vertical geophone gather, (c) radial geophone
gather, (d) transverse geophone gather, (e) denoised vertical geophone gather, (f) separated up-going gather and (g) down-going gather using the vertical
geophone data without denoising, (h) separated up-going gather and (i) down-going gather using the vertical geophone with denoising.

down-going wave has the same workflow as the one of the

up-going wave. The redatumed data can be used for QC
stacks and many other applications in the production pro-
cessing workflow. Because the 1D redatuming is an invertible
algorithm, the redatumed data can be completely retrieved
by applying a reversible process. Common receiver gathers
for down-going waves before and after 1D redatuming are
shown in figure 6a and b. The common receiver gather, as
shown in figure 6c, can be fully retrieved after applying the
reversible redatuming. Earlier arrivals than the reflections
from the ocean bottom and stretched events at far offsets
were removed as shown in figure 6b. This 1D redatumed
common receiver gathers were used to predict internal and
surface-related multiples by using a data-driven approach.
The predicted multiples were then redatumed to the water
bottom and subtracted from the original data.
More exact redatuming algorithms based on ray-tracing
for both up- and down-going wavefields were developed to
generate more accurate stacks, to be used in mirror pre-stack
time migration and for velocity analysis. Because of the
sparse receiver interval (100 × 300 m), wavefield continu-
ation using these receivers as secondary sources generated
Figure 5. Sketch of 1D redatuming aliasing artifacts in the redatumed data, especially for shallow
seismic events characterised by small curvatures. Using these
water velocity and (iii) removing moveout with the stacking aliased data, the stack images exhibited diffraction artifacts
velocity. Here, we assume to use the same stacking velocity in the shallow section. Fortunately, this aliased redatumed
model. So far, we have discussed the 1D redatuming of data could be dealiased when wavefields are back-propagated
the up-going wave. By replacing the upward shift with the during migration. To illustrate this concept, a test was con-
backward shift in the water layer, the 1D redatuming of the ducted by using a two-layer model with sparse receivers

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Figure 6. Reversible 1D redatuming. (a) Input gather of the down-going wave, (b) redatumed gather and (c) reversed gather (from Zhang et al. 2020a).

further data processing and it can be mitigated by the final

time migration step. On the other hand, the interpolation
of the input sparse data and anti-alias operator used in the
redatuming can also reduce aliasing issues to improve the
quality of subsequent processing steps. Figure 9 shows the
comparison of stack images for the down-going wave using
the redatumed data obtained by ray-tracing (with anti-alias
operator and interpolation to 50 × 50 m) and the approxi-
mate common refection point (CRP) methods (that is more
accurate than 1D redatuming) (Yue et al. 2018), where the
mapping of energy is more focused in the redatumed stack
response using ray-tracing. It is noted that all events are
better stacked using the ray-tracing algorithm as opposed to
the CRP methodology.

Figure 7. A two-layer redatuming model. Sparse receivers indicated by

yellow reversed trapezoids are located at the hypothetical ocean bottom. 3.3. Multiple attenuation
Shots denoted by explosions are excited at the sea surface.
Ray paths of multiple arrivals can achieve better subsur-
face illumination than primaries, especially in the shallow
part of the sections, and can be used as signals for better
(200-m interval) at a 500-m depth as shown in figure 7. imaging (Liu et al. 2011, 2016; Zhang et al. 2013a, 2013b;
Figure 8a is an original shot gather recorded at the ocean bot- Zhang 2014; Zhang & Schuster 2014). However, in practical
tom where the reflection is from the reflector located at 1 km. terms they are still treated as the major noise to be removed
After ray-based redatuming, the strong alias can be observed (Wiggins 1988; Verschuur et al. 1992; Jakubowicz 1998; Pica
in figure 8b. Using these aliased gathers, the obtained stack & Delmas 2008; Liu et al. 2010; Xiong et al. 2017). In this
response shows the diffraction artifacts in the stack image case study, we are exposed to a geologic regime consisting of
(figure 8c). However, the subsequent time migration can complex bathymetry that can rise to 500–700 m above the
focus the diffraction aliasing events into correct locations as surrounding ocean bottom and shallow carbonate buildups
shown in figure 8d. This allows us to use the aliased data for are characterised by a steep geologic dip of up to 80°. These

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Figure 8. Aliasing effect in the stack and migration. (a) Input data recorded at sparse OBN nodes, (b) redatumed data, (c) stack image and (d) time
migrated image.

localised internal inhomogeneous structures are made up of Delmas 2008; Xiong et al. 2017). Only the partial interbed-
layers with relatively slow velocities of 2200 m s−1 interleaved related multiples that go through the phantom layer four
with much faster layers up to 4000 m s−1 . The layers act as times are predicted. The quality of velocity and reflectivity
strong internal multiple generators, creating major imaging models determine the accuracy of interbed-related multiple
challenges producing strong ‘swing noises’ and masking pri- prediction.
maries needed for deeper pre-salt reservoir target interpreta- Alternatively, the data-driven approach does not require
tions. Unfortunately, such multiples are very challenging to velocity and reflectivity models. For the surface-related
remove because there is no velocity discrimination against multiple, we applied the SRME method (Verschuur et al.
the primaries. 1992). It predicts all possible surface multiples using the
Two methods are used to predict and eliminate interbed- input data from a convolutional process. For the interbed-
and surface-related multiples using data- and model-driven related multiple, the extended SRME method proposed by
techniques. The model-driven technique is based on the one- Jakubowicz (1998) was used. It needs to separate (mute)
way wave equation and requires a velocity model and a reflec- the dataset based on the pre-defined interbed multiple gen-
tivity model to predict the corresponding multiples with an erators, and then use appropriate correlations and con-
a priori knowledge of multiple generators. For the surface- volutions to predict the corresponding interbed multiple.
related multiple, only water-layer related multiples are pre- The effectiveness of multiple prediction and subtraction
dicted using the velocity model and reflectivity model of depends on errors of travel time caused by the approx-
the water bottom (Bernth & Sonneland 1983; Berryhill & imation in the receiver redatuming step. Except for the
Kim 1986; Wiggins 1988). For the interbed-related multi- considerable error at far offset, the data-driven approach
ple, in addition to velocity and reflectivity (migration im- was demonstrated to be accurate for near and mid off-
age) models, a phantom layer needs to be defined (Pica & sets. For both surface- and interbed-related multiples, the

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Figure 9. Comparison of stacks using (a) approximate CRP methodology and (b) the ray-tracing based redatuming method (from Alghamdi et al.
2018).

Figure 10. Common receiver gathers. (a) Input gather, surface-related multiple removed gathers using (b) model-driven and (c) data-driven methods
(from Zhang et al. 2020a).

data- and model-driven methods were independently tested interbed-related multiples because of the limitation of each
followed by subsequent adaptive subtraction and depth methodology. As a result, the cascaded flow combining the
imaging analysis. model- and data-driven technique was shown to be the op-
For the surface-related multiple case, both model- and timal and most effective solution to eliminate challenged in-
data-driven techniques achieve great results. Figure 10a is terbed multiples. Figure 11 shows a common receiver gather
an input common receiver gather and figure 10 parts b without and with internal multiple attenuation and their dif-
and c show the corresponding common receiver gathers ference. The internal multiples indicated by the arrows are
with surface-related multiple eliminated using model- and obviously removed. Verifying the data in the CDP gather do-
data-driven methods, respectively. For the interbed multi- main, most of the reverberated internal multiples are elimi-
ple, results show that each approach only partially attenuated nated, especially at the near offset as shown in figure 12 parts

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Figure 11. Common receiver gathers. (a) Input gather, (b) internal multiple attenuated gather and (c) the difference. The arrows indicate the internal
multiples.

Figure 12. CDP gather (a) before and (c) after interbed multiple elimination, and the corresponding autocorrelation coefficients (b) before and (d)
after internal multiple elimination.

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Figure 13. Stack image in the time domain. Strong short-period reverberating events of internal multiples are shown in the box generating ‘swing noise’
in the image of depth migration.

Figure 14. PSDM image (a) without and (b) with internal multiple attenuation, and (c) the difference (from Zhang et al. 2020a).

a and c. The corresponding autocorrelation coefficients as events of interbed multiples can generate strong ‘swing noise’
shown in figure 12d have fewer reverberations when com- in the image of depth migration as depicted in figure 14a. Af-
pared with those shown in figure 12b. Figure 13 shows a stack ter interbed multiple elimination, the strong internal multi-
image where an example of short-period multiple events gen- ples are mainly removed and are shown in figure 14c while the
erated from the shallow section beneath the island create a primaries are clearly preserved and the corresponding depth
sequence of false arrivals. These short-period reverberating section is shown in figure 14b.

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4. Conclusions Liu, Y., Chang, X., Jin, D., He, R., Sun, H. & Zheng, Y., 2011. Reserve time
migration of multiples for subsalt imaging, Geophysics, 76, WB209–
In this case study, we have identified the main challenges WB2196.
occurring during the processing of 3D ocean bottom node Liu, Y., Jin, D., Chang, X., Li, P., Sun, H. & Luo, Y., 2010. Multiple sub-
data acquired on a rugose water bottom, with complex traction using statistically estimated inverse wavelets, Geophysics, 75,
bathymetry and a highly geologic structural subsurface. We WB247–WB254.
Liu, Y., Liu, X., Are, O., Shao, Y., Hu, H. & Zheng, Y., 2016. Least-squares
have presented, using real data examples, a number of solu- reverse time migration using controlled-order multiple reflections, Geo-
tions applied in the critical steps of data processing. These physics, 81, S347–S357.
solutions provided a final improved migration image for both Muijs, R., Robertsson, J. & Holliger, K., 2004. Data-driven adaptive de-
down- and up-going waves. We have discussed the impor- composition of multicomponent seabed recordings, Geophysics, 69,
tance of noise attenuation to the vertical geophone by us- 1329–1337.
ing all four recorded components before applying PZ sum- Pica, A. & Delmas, L., 2008. Wave equation based internal multiple mod-
eling in 3D, SEG Technical Program Expanded Abstracts.
mation. 1D redatuming or ray-tracing redatuming from the Rao, Y. & Wang, Y., 2016. VSP wave separation by adaptive masking filters,
ocean bottom to the sea level is critical for stack QCs and Journal of Geophysics and Engineering, 13, 412–421.

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other subsequent processes in the processing work flow. Both Soubaras, R., 1996. Ocean bottom hydrophone and geophone processing,
model- and data-driven techniques were shown to be effec- SEG Technical Program Expanded Abstracts.
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multiple elimination, in Proceedings of the SPE Middle East Oil & Gas
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