Patent Document ID: 20120039149
Application ID: 12806544
Patent Flag: 0

Claim One:
1. A method for separating seismic sources, comprising: using a programmable computer to perform the following: applying an operator in a frequency domain to multiple source seismic data acquired in a marine seismic survey with multiple sources substantially horizontally collocated and at different depths to generate an estimate of a primary source wavefield, the operator constructed to compensate for a time delay between a primary source and one or more secondary sources and for different depths of the primary and secondary sources; adaptively subtracting the estimate of the primary source wavefield from the multiple-source seismic data to generate an estimate of one or more secondary source wavefields; applying another operator in the frequency domain to the estimates of the one or more secondary source wavefields to generate another estimate of the primary source wavefield, the operator constructed to compensate for time delays between the primary source and the one or more secondary sources and for different depths of the primary and secondary sources; and using the estimates of the primary source and the one or more secondary source wavefields, after further iterative refinements to remove noise, to generate upgoing and downgoing wavefield components of the multiple source seismic data.