Ambiguous reflection coefficients for anelastic media

The calculation of reflection and transmission coefficients of plane waves at a plane interface between two homogeneous anelastic media may become ambiguous because it is not always obvious how to determine the sign of the vertical component of the slowness vector of the scattered waves. For elastic media, the sign is determined by applying so-called radiation condition when the slowness vector is complex-valued, but it has long been known that this approach does not work satisfactorily for anelastic media. Other approaches have been suggested, e.g., by requiring that the reflection and transmission coefficients should vary continuously with increasing incident angles, or by relating the sign to the direction of the energy flux. In the present paper, it is shown that these approaches may give different results, and that the results can be inconsistent with the elastic case even for weak attenuation. Instead, it is demonstrated that the ambiguity in the reflection coefficient can be resolved by expressing the seismic response of a point source over an interface as a superposition of plane waves and their reflection coefficients, and solving the resulting integral by the saddle point approximation. Although the saddle point itself (point of stationary phase) does not provide new insight, the ambiguity is removed by considering the steepest descent path through the point. Ray synthetic seismograms computed by this method compare well with synthetics computed by the reflectivity method, which does not suffer from the above-mentioned ambiguity since the integration path is taken along the real axis.