Seismic Exploration Random Noise on Land: Modeling and Application to Noise Suppression

In seismic exploration, random noise suppression is one of the key problems in seismic data processing. For random noise attenuation, the most important thing is the understanding of seismic random noise generation and propagation. Seismic random noise is considered as temporal and spatial random processes, and it can be analyzed only qualitatively for now, due to its high variability. In this paper, we classify seismic random noise sources by their generation factors and simulate the random noise of the desert in West China. According to Green's function, it can be assumed that seismic random noise sources are point-like sources that are distributed around geophones. A seismic random noise record is taken as the superimposed wave field exited by all the independent sources in a homogeneous isotropy half-infinite surface. Based on the wind vibration theory and preliminary study about ambient vibrations, the noise source functions are determined. We obtain the waveforms of different kinds of noise by solving the inhomogeneous wave equations and analyze the characteristics qualitatively and quantitatively. The seismic synthetic record with a 1.6-s time and 250-m distances is obtained, and the characteristics are compared between the simulated and the real noise record in time domain and space domain, respectively. The comparative results show the same characteristics of the simulated noise and the real noise, which demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed method. According to the noise modeling, it is known that the near-field cultural noise is the main component of the random noise in the desert, on the basis of which complex diffusion filtering is selected. The filtered results by complex diffusion filtering is compared with the results of time-frequency peak filtering, which is a popular filtering method of seismic random noise suppression in recent years. The comparative results show that complex diffusion filtering is more suitable for the noise of the desert in the Tarim Basin. This result proves that seismic random noise modeling can provide the guidance for noise attenuation. It lays a foundation for researching the propagation characteristics and better attenuation of seismic random noise in the future.