This textbook was born of the need to teach the best of the many new ideas to those entering the industry. Because so many people enter geophysics from outside the field, I have kept specialized geophysical terminology to a minimum and defined everything. So this book should be useful, not only to those interested in petroleum exploration, but also to professionals in all disciplines in which waves are analyzed.
My previous book, Fundamentals of Geophysical Data Processing (FGDP), was published in 1976 and has recently been reissued. It covered more basic aspects of reflection seismic data processing such as $Z$-transforms, Fourier transforms, discrete linear system theory, matrices, statistics, and theory of the stratified earth. FGDP also introduced wave-equation imaging, but extensive supplements became necessary. The supplements evolved into this book. The two books are about ninety percent different, the ten percent overlap being necessary to keep this book fully self-contained.
This book provides a coherent overview of the whole field of data processing as it is used in petroleum exploration, and it is the basic textbook in exploration geophysics at Stanford University. I make no claim, however, that the book is encyclopedic in scope. Some important processes such as deconvolution and statics are lightly sketched, as are the experimental applications of tomography, while other techniques such as ray tracing (see Cerveny [1977]) and many kinds of modeling are omitted altogether. Regrettably, the migration literature alone has grown so large that significant contributions such as the theoretical side of Kirchhoff migration (see Berkhout[1980]) are omitted.