Imaging with Refraction Seismograms , by Jon F. Claerbout

In reflection seismic prospecting the first arriving waves at long offsets (called refractions) are usually discarded by an operation called "muting." These waves are known to contain readily extractable information about shallow seismic velocity. The velocity determination technique involves a plane layer assumption and the fitting of first arrival times to a piecewise straight line travel time curve. The spatial resolving power is very poor, usually comparable to the shot-to-geophone offset. The purpose of the present paper is to describe a technique with resolving power comparable to a wavelength, hence the word "imaging" in the title. Whether this theoretical resolving power can be achieved in practice or whether the method will fail to work even for the best field data, is completely unknown at the present time.


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