Methods in Computational Physics

ALTHOUGH THE INCREASING NUMBER of publications dealing with the computation of synthetic (theoretical) seismograms for layered media has been due mainly to the rapidly developing computing facilities of universities and geophysical research centers, the first few quite acceptable agreements between synthetic seismograms and field records (Helmberger, 1968; Helmberger and Morris, 1969) suggest that synthetic seismograms could play an important role in interpreting field materials in the near future. After evaluating results, it becomes obvious that a ray theory, which decomposes the displacement field into contributions attributed to the individual rays, is one of the most efficient methods that could be used for computation of synthetic seismograms.