Sloan, Steven D.Steeples, Don W.Malin, Peter E.2015-03-312015-03-312008-01-01Steven D. Sloan, Don W. Steeples, and Peter E. Malin (2008). ”Acquisition and processing pitfall associated with clipping near-surface seismic reflection traces.” Acquisition and processing pitfall associated with clipping near-surface seismic reflection traces, 73(1), W1-W5, http://www.dx.doi.org/10.1190/1.28070510016-8033https://hdl.handle.net/1808/17267This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from "http://library.seg.org".The processing of clipped seismic traces may produce high-frequency wavelets that can be misinterpreted as reflections in filtered shot gathers and common-midpoint (CMP) stacked sections. To illustrate this effect, a near-surface CMP seismic reflection survey was conducted using two sources to compare the effects of various band-pass frequency filters on clipped traces. An event observed in the clipped data set replicated the frequency of the filter operators applied, similar to the effect of convolving a boxcar function with the filter operator. The anomaly exhibited hyperbolic moveout and imitated a reflection during the processing stages. The hyperbolic event was flattened by NMO corrections chosen for the target reflection, and it stacked in as a coherent event in the final section. Clipped data should be removed or corrected before processing to prevent misinterpreting high-frequency reflection artifacts in trace gathers and stacked sections.Article10.1190/1.2807051openAccess