INTRODUCTION

Most conventional seismic processing steps assume either that the velocity function, v(z), is known, or that it can be determined from the data. A further, related, assumption is that the earth is isotropic. This is a major convenience and allows the use of simple, ray-based arguments for developing processes such as DMO. This Isotropic Paradigm is clearly useful where it is backed up by well control, but is unnecessary and may be quite misleading in frontier areas where surface seismic is the sole information source.

In case of surface seismic data all processing steps up to and including image reconstruction can be accomplished using a model space not involving depth, and in this Short Note general kinematic relations are presented which provide a basis for such a methodology. An important feature of the relations is that the parameters involved are "addable" and thus allow data to be decomposed into intervals.