Seismic arrival enhancement through the use of noise whitening

A constant feature in seismic data, noise is particularly troublesome for passive seismic monitoring where noise commonly masks microseismic events. We propose a statistics-driven noise suppression technique that whitens the noise through the calculation and removal of the noise's covariance. Noise whitening is shown to reduce the noise energy by a factor of 3.5 resulting in microseismic events being observed and imaged at lower signal to noise ratios than originally possible – whilst having negligible effect on the seismic wavelet. The procedure is shown to be highly resistant to most changes in the noise properties and has the flexibility of being used as a stand-alone technique or as a first step before standard random noise attenuation methods.