Removing free-surface multiples from teleseismic transmission and constructed reflection responses using reciprocity and the inverse scattering series

We develop a new way to remove free-surface multiples from teleseismic P- transmission and constructed reflection responses. We consider two types of teleseismic waves with the presence of the free surface: One is the recorded waves under the real transmission geometry; the other is the constructed waves under a virtual reflection geometry. The theory presented is limited to 1D plane wave acoustic media, but this approximation is reasonable for the teleseismic P-wave problem resulting from the steep emergence angle of the wavefield. Using one-way wavefield reciprocity, we show how the teleseismic reflection responses can be reconstructed from the teleseismic transmission responses. We use the inverse scattering series to remove free-surface multiples from the original transmission data and from the reconstructed reflection response. We derive an alternative algorithm for reconstructing the reflection response from the transmission data that is obtained by taking the difference between the teleseismic transmission waves before and after free-surface multiple removal. Numerical tests with 1D acoustic layered earth models demonstrate the validity of the theory we develop. Noise test shows that the algorithm can work with S/N ratio as low as 5 compared to actual data with S/N ratio from 30 to 50. Testing with elastic synthetic data indicates that the acoustic algorithm is still effective for small incidence angles of typical teleseismic wavefields.