A technique for decomposing a recorded wave field represented in a set of multicomponent, marine seismic data centers around a computer-implemented method including: estimating the statistics of the noise terms in each one of a predetermined group of seismic measurements in a seismic data set acquired in a marine survey; modeling the physical propagation of a recorded wave field represented in the seismic data set from the estimated statistics; and estimating a directional component of the recorded wave field from the physical propagation model that minimizes error relative to the seismic measurements.