Acquisition and separation of coherent simultaneous sources: Theory and an application to data acquired in the Sultanate of Oman

In an effort to reduce acquisition costs or increase (source) sampling density, we have developed a coherent simultaneous-source scheme. Different from most existing simultaneous acquisition, our scheme enforces the received signal to remain coherent in all sorting domains, thus even in the common-receiver domain. A major benefit of the enforced signal coherency is that it enables multidomain preprocessing prior to source separation. At the same time, it poses a challenge to the source separation itself. Based on the observation that the proposed coherent simultaneous-source scheme is equivalent to the traditional source array, we have developed a novel source separation method that comprises (1) interpolating the observed signal in the space domain and (2) removing the source-array effect. In practice, the source-array effect cannot perfectly be removed in the presence of notches. This fact can, however, be deliberately leveraged for noise attenuation.