Echoes from the seabed: the continuing evolution of industrial multicomponent seismic data processing and imaging

Over the last 40 years, the processing of ocean-bottom seismic data evolved from ghost attenuation by deconvolution to multicomponent wavefield separation and multidimensional deconvolution, and from single-component P-wave-only to multicomponent PP and PS. It benefited from continuous improvements in imaging applicable to seismic data in general, with the addition of some specific developments associated with peculiarities of ocean bottom data, chiefly for mirror imaging and joint PP-PS tomography with structural constraints. However there are also unresolved challenges. These are associated with the complexity and sampling limitations implicit with this type of data. The rise of full waveform inversion as a velocity model building and imaging tool presents the vision of a new dawn where these challenges may be finally overcome.