The advent of multi-component seismic recordings at the seabed offers
the perspective to decompose the wavefield into its up- and downgoing
P- and S-wave components. Most decomposition algorithms require (i)
accurate knowledge of the elastic properties of the sea floor in
the immediate vicinity of the receivers and (ii) properly calibrated
sensors such that the data are a faithful vector representation of
the actual ground motion. In this paper, we present a strategy to
accurately estimate the necessary information by imposing constraints
on inter- mediate decomposition results. The proposed scheme is based
on a recent adaptive decomposition technique suggested by Schalkwijk
et al. (1999) and shares its feature of being completely data-driven
in the sense that it requires no a priori information, such as water
depth or source signature. Our scheme, however, is based on the observation
that imperfect wave field decomposition results in energy arriving
simultaneously in suitable combinations of wavefield constituents.