Several discoveries, such as Tupi, Bem-Te-Vi, Parati, and Guara, have been announced in Santos Basin off the coast of Brazil, mostly in presalt layers. These layers were well imaged by a salt-flood volume in 2003, but distortions in the base of salt (BOS) and presalt layers were still obvious. Therefore, a constant velocity model is not adequate to capture the velocity variation inside the salt bodies, which include mobile salt and evaporites. A depth migration with a complete salt model is necessary to correctly position the reservoir structures. In this paper, we discuss the challenges in building such a velocity model and share the lessons we learned while working on a data set from the deepwater Santos Basin.

Wide-azimuth towed streamer (WATS) acquisition improves the subsalt seismic image by suppressing multiples, improves the results of 3D surface-related-multiple elimination (SRME) processing, and provides more uniform seismic illumination of subsalt targets. A simple model shows that the additional suppression of multiples in the case of WATS acquisition is the result of a natural weighting of the traces going into the stack due to the areal nature of the acquisition. This simple model also shows that the extent of the additional multiple suppression is strongly dependent on the acquisition effort. A sparse acquisition effort will result in little additional multiple suppression. The use of 3D SRME processing is shown to be more accurate in predicting multiples, given input data with multiple azimuths, compared to making similar predictions from narrow-azimuth data. Three-dimensional SRME has the potential to reduce the residual multiples to the same extent as WATS acquisition with a higher acquisition effort. A complex model demonstrates that WATS acquisition does reduce the multiple-generated noise in subsalt images, but 3D SRME processing further reduces the residual multiple noise. The use of 3D SRME may reduce the multiples more than that achieved by increasing the cable half-aperture in the WATS acquisition effort. Finally, ray trace modeling is used to investigate the effect of WATS acquisition on subsurface illumination for subsalt imaging. We show that narrow-azimuth acquisition produces irregularities in subsalt illumination perpendicular to the acquisition direction which are a potential cause of migration noise. WATS acquisition results in higher and more uniform subsalt illumination and, hence, improves the subsalt image by reducing subsalt migration noise.

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Variable-depth streamer acquisition is becoming a key technique for providing wide bandwidth seismic data. Varying the receiver depth creates wide receiver ghost diversity and produces a spectacular increase in the frequency bandwidth. However, compared to conventional data, this variable-depth streamer data implies a major challenge in processing: how to deal with various receiver ghosts. The ghosts have to be preserved up to the deghosting step. Here we present the implication for the following de-multiple methods: Shallow-Water Demultiple, Tau-P deconvolution and Surface-related multiples elimination in deep and shallow water environments.