Separation of recorded wavefields into downgoing and upgoing constituents is a technique that is used in many geophysical methods. The conventional, multi-component (MC) wavefield decomposition scheme makes use of different recorded wavefield components. In recent years, land acquisition designs have emerged that make use of shallow horizontal downhole sensor arrays. Inspired by marine acquisition designs that make use of recordings at multiple depth levels for wavefield decomposition, we have

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... ecently developed a multi-depth level (MDL) wavefield decomposition scheme for land acquisition. Exploiting the underlying theory of this scheme, we now consider conventional, multi-component (MC) decomposition as an inverse problem, which we try to constrain in a better way. We have overdetermined the inverse problem by adding an MDL equation that exploits the Dirichlet free-surface boundary condition. To investigate the successfulness of this approach, we have applied both MC and combined MC-MDL decomposition to a real land dataset acquired in Annerveen, the Netherlands. Comparison of the results of overdetermined MC-MDL decomposition with the results of MC wavefield decomposition, clearly shows improvements in the obtained one-way wavefields, especially for the downgoing fields.