In marine seismic acquisitions, a major deteriorating effect on resolution is caused by ghost reflections. Sensors towed at depth within a water column record not only the desired up-going wavefield reflected from geological formations, but also its reflections from the sea surface known as down-going wavefield, or seismic ghost. This generates notches in the spectrum of the measured wavefield, reducing significantly the usable bandwidth and accordingly the resolution of the seismic data. Recently, the removal of the ghost (‘de-ghosting') has attracted increasing attention with the aim of obtaining more broadband data.
In this paper, 2D spatially variant de-ghosting filtering technique is used to eliminate the ghost effect and recover the lost lower and higher frequency data for marine-towed streamer data in the Western Offshore Province, Egypt. Since 1999, many 2D surveys using conventional acquisition have been carried out across the Western offshore Province, Egypt. Nevertheless the hydrocarbon prospectivity in the area was very challenging, because most of the available old 2D seismic data were of poor quality. One of the major imaging challenges in the area was the limited bandwidth and resolution due to the effect of the ghost. The methodology used in this paper demonstrates its effectiveness and versatility to be used for any vintage and new marine streamer seismic data.