Interpretation of first arrival travel times in seismic refraction work

The necessary condition for the seismic refraction method to succeed is that the refracted first arrivals from each layer in a multilayered earth system should be detected on a seismogram as first arrivals, and this is possible only when velocities of all underlying layers are successively greater. The usual procedure to interpret the refraction travel times is to fit such a data set with several intersecting straight lines by employing a visual technique which may lead to errors of subjective judgment, as the velocity model depends on the selection of various line segments through the data. To remove the visual fit we propose here a layer stripping method based on minimum intercept time, apparent velocity, rms residual, and maximum data points by least-squares fitting to yield several intersecting straight lines. Once data are segmented out, the conventional equations can be used to determine the velocity structure.