A New Approach to Water Velocity Estimation and Correction

A layer replacement method for estimating and correcting seismic data for the variation in the velocity of sound in water not only overcomes some of the difficulties of a conventional method, it produces estimates of absolute rather than relative water velocity. The method involves iterative layer-replacement of water bottom reflection times and accounts for both dip of the water bottom and source-detector azimuth. Although the new and conventional methods share some elements, they differ in concept and result. The layer replacement method has been found efficient and effective in processing 3D marine seismic data.