Overview of seismic interferometry and applications in applied seismology

Seismic interferometry can be defined as correlating two seismic traces together and summing the resultant correlograms over the shot or receiver indices. A major benefit is that the source and/or receiver arrays can be redatumed to be closer to the target body without knowing the velocity model. Another major benefit is that multiple scattered arrivals can be transformed into primary reflections to sometimes provide superillumination, super-resolution, super-stacking, elimination of well statics, interpolation, data extrapolation, and no need to know the velocity model or the source's excitation time or wavelet. In this talk I will present the key ideas and formulas of seismic interferometry and illustrate them with examples from marine data, land data, and synthetic data. A recent development is the anti-aliasing formula derived by Cao for any numerical application of the reciprocity equation of correlation type. I will show how this formula can be used to optimize the interferometric interpolation and extrapolation of seismic data. I will also point out new directions in the exciting area of seismic interferometry research.