Evaluating the Benefit of Pressure-plus-gradient Reconstruction of Time-lapse Seismic Wavefields

The repeatability of time-lapse seismic data depends upon the repeatability of the acquisition geometry. Despite the availability of high precision navigation systems and steerable streamers, matching seismic survey geometries can require spatial over-sampling and/or wavefield interpolation. Horizontal gradients of the pressure wavefield could greatly alleviate the cross-line sampling issue by doubling the cross-line wavenumber. This paper explores the benefit of using gradients in the reconstruction of pressure wavefields and finds that the reconstruction errors up to twice the pressure-only Nyquist frequency are well within acceptable time-lapse bounds. The use of a multi-channel interpolation by matching pursuit algorithm, in particular, offers good promise for higher order de-aliasing beyond twice-Nyquist.