COMPLETE INVERSION OF ZERO-OFFSET SEISMIC DATA*

The one-dimensional seismic inverse problem consists of recovering the acoustic impedance (or reflectivity function) as a function of traveltime from the reflection response of a horizontally layered medium excited by a plane-wave impulsive source. Most seismic sources behave like point sources, and the data must be corrected for geometrical spreading before the inversion procedure is applied. This correction is usually not exact because the geometrical spreading is different for primary and multiple reflections. An improved algorithm is proposed which takes the geometrical spreading from a point source into account. The zero-offset reflection response from a stack of homogeneous layers of variable thickness is used to compute the thickness, velocity and density of each layer. This is possible because the geometrical spreading contains additional information about the velocities.