Enhancement of seismic data gathered by floating ice acquisition: Application of local kinematic attributes

The presence of large areas covered by shallow waters, like swamps, rivers, lakes and so on, troubles seismic exploration in the Russian Far North in summer. The winter seems to be much more appropriate time to implement seismic acquisitions for reasonable cost but with acceptable quality of the data. The same is true for transition zones. Really, in winter there is possible, at least technically, use floating ice and apply the developed technology for onshore seismic study. But in winter there is another complicating factor - intensive seismic noise generated by sources placed onto ice covering shallow waters. It is well known that this noise is connected with flexural waves propagating along the ice. These waves are much slower than surface waves, which are well studied for onshore acquisitions and, hence, seem to be easy avoided by the modern versions of f-k filters. Unfortunately, straightforward application of this type of noise suppression fails. To understand the matter, the representative series of numerical experiments are conducted which prove that the main impact to noise is multiple conversions of flexural waves to the body ones and vice versa. Ways to reduce this noise by special processing procedures are proposed and discussed.