Upside down Rayleigh-Marchenko imaging: towards a practical exact redatuming scheme for ocean bottom acquisitions

Ocean-bottom seismic plays a crucial role in the characterization and monitoring of offshore assets. The presence of coarse receiver sampling (in the crossline direction for ocean-bottom cables, and in both directions for ocean-bottom nodes) poses challenges to accurate wavefield redatuming, affecting the overall quality of subsequent imaging products. In this work, we propose a modified version of the Rayleigh-Marchenko equations, where all spatial integrals are performed over the (usually much better-sampled) source carpet; this results in a theoretically exact redatuming method that can handle irregular and sparse receiver geometries provided availability of multi-component receivers and either dual-sources or a pre-processing step of model-based source deghosting. Two synthetic examples are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.