Effective suppression of spurious events when generating reflected P- and PS-wave data using seismic interferometry

•The cross-correlation gather has both stationary energy and nonstationary energy.•The nonstationary energy yields spurious events in the virtual source response.•We proposed a method for suppressing them by using f–k filtering with edge muting.•It successfully suppressed spurious events in multicomponent virtual source data.

Seismic interferometry is a technique for generating new seismic responses by cross-correlating seismic observations at different receiver locations that is gaining popularity for imaging and monitoring subsurface structures below a complex overburden. In seismic interferometry, extracting an exact response is an important issue. The energy of a stationary zone contributes to the collection of correct events, but the energy of a nonstationary zone causes spurious events. The cross-correlation gather has both stationary energy and nonstationary energy. If the nonstationary energy in the cross-correlation gather is not canceled out during stacking, it introduces spurious events in the stacked result. In this study, we present a simple and effective method for suppressing the spurious events that occur during the generation of virtual source data by using f–k filtering with edge muting. In a test using synthetic multicomponent data created under the geometry of the Ocean Bottom Cable survey, the proposed method successfully suppressed spurious events in multicomponent interferometric data.