4C OBC shear wave processing in shallow water environment of the Arabian Gulf

4C OBC data acquired in harsh shallow water environment of the Arabian Gulf contains highly dispersive surface waves, which challenges the current processing methodology and limits the potential benefit of the 4C OBC data. Nevertheless, it also provides rather new opportunity for shear wave exploration. Previous theoretical research indicated the presence of shear waves generated by an effective secondary shear source located on the water bottom (SS waves), when airgun-seabed distance is much less than the dominate wavelength. However, most existing processing techniques, utilizing pressure and vertical components only, are designed to acquire the P-SV converted waves at deep reflectors with down-going P waves. We propose a model-based 4C OBC processing workflow with partial stacking to identify and split the direct shear wave information through all four components. Modeling result illustrates that the energy of the SS wave is much stronger than the PP wave, and it also verified that the shear waves undergo phase changes with offset. Field data test shows that the structural interpretations based on P and S velocity sections are consistent. These results demonstrate the reliability of extracted S waves and the applicability of the proposed processing workflow for shear wave exploration in shallow marine environments.