The assumption of anisotropic elastic models, in the context of exploration seismology, has been increasing since the advent of new aquisition tecniques: VSP, walkway VSP, crosshole tomography and large offset seismic surveys. Effective anisotropic elastic models can account for patterns of inhomogeneities at a scale much lower than the wavelength of the propagating seismic energy. Particularly, effective media can account for the most robust seismic data, i.e., traveltime measurements. This work investigates some aspects of wave propagation, raytracing and traveltime inversion in anisotropic media. The propagation of SH waves in a layered anisotropic medium in the most general case where these waves can occur, i.e., propagation in the mirror symmetry plane of a monoclinic medium, is studied. It is shown that SH reflected field from a stratified half-space is 'blind' to the possible anisotropy below. Fast ray tracing procedures for stratified anisotropic media in 3D are presented. Such ray tracing codes are a first step towards the development of traveltime inversion algorithms for non-flat anisotropic layers in 3D. Traveltime inversion of VSP and walkway VSP is a promissing approach to 3D velocity model building, starting from a well location. These velocity models are necessary for the migration of seismic data in the presence of anisotropy. The analysis of the nonlinear tomographic inversion, for a vertically inhomogeneous transversally isotropic medium with vertical axis of symmetry (TIV), is presented. The limitations of qP traveltime data are pointed as well as the consequences of the lack of full angular ray coverage for tomographic inversion. An algorithm for tomographic inversion is presented and evaluated in synthetic data seis. Application to real data is presented. This approach is attractive for cases where the formations are known a priori to be relatively flat, and where crosswell data itself shows a high degree of left-right symmetry. It also may be of use for preliminary surveys, where the layered estimate can be used as a background model to carry out more detailed analysis, e.g., as an anisotropic velocity model for migration, or as a calibration model for AVO analysis.
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