NMO Stretching (often modified by long offset mutes) are unwanted shifts for specific seismic events. Please discuss what is the main reason of its occurance?! What is the best way to overcome it? Muting, slant stacking, ..... Please discuss
I think, the main reason for NMO stretch is the NMO correction itself. It is well explained in the online course of the Delft University of Technology. Given a certain
stacking velocity and offset, the correction T-T0 becomes smaller when T0 becomes larger. Thus, the correction is not constant along a trace, even if we have a constant offset and constant velocity. Also, we can see from this correction that the effect will become more prominent when the offset becomes larger as well.
In addition, the NMO correction is non-linear with respect to the offset and zero-offset traveltime.
Thus, the NMO stretch increases at greater offset or shallower depth (smaller reflection time), see for example the book of Zhou" Practical Seismic Data Analysis" .
YES, NMO stretch are due to the nonparallelism of the local traveltime of each reflection event or in the frequency domain to the nonphysical energy changes caused by the nonstationary time shifts applied (see Buchholtz, 1972 and dunkin and levin ,1973). The standard NMO correction got addtional issues that
add to the wavelet bandwidth compression, and those are the partial duplication
of the recorded events and the time inversion of the samples of a reflection. Several methods exist to mitigate and attenuate that effect...depending on the type fo seismic acquisition and/or processing history that affected the final stack.
you can get there by partial correction ...there is a nice paper on the subject :Nonstretch normal moveout through iterative partial
correction and deconvolution, geophysics, 79,131-141.Or , a nonstretch technique based on an iterative-matchingpursuit algorithm, which recovers wavelet distortions caused by NMO correction.