Paper submitted to IMAGE 2026, by Akshika Rohatgi, Andrey Bakulin, Sergey Fomel (University of Texas at Austin), Andrew Peterson (TGS).
Abstract
Seismic phase is highly sensitive to near-surface effects, including scattering and other noise sources, leading to trace-dependent distortions that degrade waveform coherence. These distortions occur at short spatial scales, vary rapidly from trace to trace, and appear statistically independent rather than surface consistent. We propose a phase-masking method based on circular statistics that treats phase as a wrapped variable and estimates local reference phase using the circular mean of neighboring traces. Applied in the frequency domain, the method stabilizes phase without altering amplitudes or kinematics. Synthetic and land field examples demonstrate significant reduction in phase variability and improved prestack and stack coherence.
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