A critical review of acoustic wave modeling procedures in 2.5 dimensions

Abstract

In a short note Liner (1991) postulated a wave equation that would allow efficient computation of 3-D wavefields in c(x, z) media when the sources and receivers lie in a common, y = 0 plane. Liner and his co‐researchers continued to investigate this wave equation in two further papers (Liner and Stockwell, 1993; Bording and Liner, 1993). This problem, known as the 2.5-D problem (after Bleistein, 1986), is of great importance because of the prevalence of 2-D surveys in seismic exploration and the cost of full 3-D modeling. We have discovered that a solution to the 2.5-D problem based on previously published information about filters is more accurate than Liner’s method.