There is an increasing interest in seismic exploration in studying media of lower anisotropic symmetry. It is therefore necessary to study traveltime inversion of data obtained in such media using various experiments in order to find out, which parameters and under what conditions can be retrieved from observed traveltime data. We concentrate on a VSP (vertical seismic profiling) experiment, which provides a good angular illumination, and we study the inversion on several sets of synthetic P-wave traveltime data in homogeneous models of orthorhombic media. As expected, results of preliminary tests indicate sensitivity to the quality of the angular illumination of the model and strong sensitivity to noise.
The paper is available in PDF (530 kB).