Abstract: It is difficult to attenuate deepwater water-layer multiple using the shallow water multiple attenuation (SWMA) method or the conventional surface-related multiple elimination (SRME) method, because the deepwater water-layer velocity is not constant.This paper proposes a deepwater water-layer multiple elimination (DWME) method driven by a variable water velocity model.The method first estimates the water-layer multiple travel-time by building the sea bottom model and variable water velocity model.Then, seismic data wave field extrapolation is performed according to the estimated travel-time in the τ-p domain to predict water-layer multiple.Finally, the adaptive matching subtraction is applied to eliminate the multiples.Testing results on both synthetic data and field data show that the DWME can effectively suppress deepwater water-layer multiples.