An efficient method for calculating spherical-wave reflection coefficients

Charles P. Ursenbach, Arnim B. Haase

A method is presented for efficiently calculating the spherical-wave generalization of the Zoeppritz PP reflection coefficients. The main restriction is in choosing a particular form of wavelet that allows for analytic integration over frequencies. This, combined with calculating only one time point instead of the entire time trace, results in calculations sufficiently rapid to be carried out interactively on the computer. The method is implemented both in MATLAB and as an interactive Java applet, and results are shown for an AVO Class I model. It is also shown that the calculation of spherical-wave reflection coefficients can, in practice, be cast as a weighted integral of a relatively small set of plane-wave reflection coefficients, which may allow one to achieve still more efficient calculations.