Endrias Asgedom: A new approach to post-stack diffraction separation

Recently, separation and imaging of diffracted waves have shown the capability of providing highly resolved images of discontinuities associated with complex geological areas. In this paper we propose a novel and highly robust technique for separating diffractions from reflections. The main idea is that diffracted waves (either from seismic or Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR)) can be described by a modified version of the moveout equation normally employed by the Common Reflection Surface (CRS) technique. To ensure an optimal selection of the diffracted energy a coherency measure has to be applied. Two different measures were tested in this study: Semblance and MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC). The potential of the new separation technique has been demonstrated using both Marmousi data and a multi-offset GPR field dataset. In both cases well separated diffractions were obtained.