In recent years, considerable progress has been made in studies of the lateral heterogeneities in the Earth's interior and of seismic sources situated in realistic inhomogeneous media. In connection with these studies, the role of the ray method and of its various modifications is becoming increasingly important. In this paper, ways of applying the ray method to the evaluation of high-frequency body wave synthetic seismograms and synthetic time sections in complex two-dimensional and three-dimensional laterally varying layered structures are discussed. Certain new developments in the ray theory, mainly dynamic ray tracing and the paraxial ray approximation, make these computations fast and effective, even in 3-D structures. Although the computations are only approximate and the ray method may fail partially or completely in certain situations, the ray concepts have been found very useful in many practical applications of great seismological interest. The paper explains the physical principles and the most important algorithmic steps in the computation of ray synthetic seismograms. Numerical examples of ray synthetic seismograms and ray synthetic time sections are presented.
Seismic waves, synthetic seismograms, ray method, dynamic ray tracing, paraxial ray approximation.
The image of the reprint in GIF 150dpi (10922 kB !!) is designed for an instant screen preview.
The scanned image of the reprint in PDF 300dpi (2821 kB !) is designed for printing.
SW3D
- main page of consortium Seismic Waves in Complex 3-D Structures .