Seismic ray method:: Recent developments

The seismic ray method has found broad applications in the numerical calculation of seismic wavefields in complex 3-D, isotropic and anisotropic, laterally varying layered structures and in the solution of forward and inverse problems of seismology and seismic exploration for oil. This chapter outlines the basic features of the seismic ray method, and reviews its possibilities and recent extensions. Considerable attention is devoted to ray tracing and dynamic ray tracing of S waves in heterogeneous anisotropic media, to the coupling ray theory for S waves in such media, to the summation of Gaussian beams and packets, and to the selection of models suitable for ray tracing.