Fixing the nonuniform directionality of seismic daylight interferometry may be crucial to its success

The seismic daylight interferometry method of replacing active sources with receivers that act as virtual sources has huge potential for seismic exploration. The potential is because receivers can be placed in many locations where it is impractical, environmentally harmful, dangerous, or expensive to place active sources. Yet, the public tests of seismic daylight interferometry to date show generally poor data quality. We argue that this poor data quality may well result from the non-uniform directionality of the incident seismic wavefield measured at the receiver that is to become the virtual source. We present a passive data example that demonstrates the non-uniformity.