Plane‐layer prestack inversion in the presence of surface reverberation

Experiments with synthetic data have indicated that generalized linear inversion may be used to estimate compressional velocities as a function of depth with high resolution directly from band‐limited, unstacked data. The ocean surface was not included in these experiments. In the presence of strong surface multiples, inversion is expected to take longer and be less accurate, because events from multiple surface reflections overlie primary events and normally have differing moveout. Existing velocity‐analysis techniques rely on the ability of an observer to make the difficult distinction between multiples and primaries. Equations are provided for adding the surface to the inversion procedure. This involves adding the surface effects to the Jacobian matrix as well as to the forward modeling procedure. To speed computation, the addition of the surface effects to the Jacobian matrix is delayed until after the matrix has been multiplied by a vector in the linear‐equation solution. Absorption is added to the i...