A deep-water ray-based blind deconvolution (DW-RBD) method for estimating the channel impulse response of a near-surface source with a bottom-moored vertical array is developed. The proposed DW-RBD is an alternative when the original RBD suffers from performance degradation due to the insufficient beam resolution. The signal-processing scheme coherently utilizes the information of multipath time-delay implied in the conventional wideband beamforming output. A time-delay-related compensation term is then derived based on image theory and introduced into the original RBD to enhance multipath separation. Both simulation and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. (C) 2022 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).