A modified delay-time method for statics estimation with the virtual refraction

Topography and near-surface heterogeneities lead to traveltime perturbations in surface land-seismic experiments. Usually, these perturbations are estimated and removed prior to further processing of the data. A common technique to estimate these perturbations is the delay-time method. We have developed the "modified delay-time method," wherein we isolate the arrival times of the virtual refraction and estimate receiver-side delay times. The virtual refraction is a spurious arrival found in wavefields estimated by seismic interferometry. The new method removes the source term from the delay-time equation, is more robust in the presence of noise, and extends the lateral aperture compared to the conventional delay-time method. We tested this in an elastic 2D numerical example, where we estimated the receiver delay-times above a horizontal refractor. Taking advantage of reciprocity of the wave equation and rearranging the common shot gathers into common receiver gathers, isolated source delay times could also be obtained.