An efficient method for AVO modeling of reflected spherical waves

Abstract

A method is presented for efficiently and accurately calculating the spherical‐wave generalization of the Zoeppritz P‐wave reflection coefficients. The main assumptions are that the wavelet is an exponential form that allows for analytic integration over frequency, and the direction of propagation and arrival time are as dictated by ray theory. These assumptions result in calculations sufficiently rapid to be carried out interactively on the computer. Results for an AVO Class I model show that this method quantitatively reproduces exact spherical‐wave reflection coefficients obtained using a Ricker wavelet.