Reflection and transmission responses for layered transversely isotropic media with vertical and horizontal symmetry axes

Abstract

Reflection and transmission (R/T) responses characterize the energy distributions for incident and generated waves across the subsurface interface. The R/T coefficients are considerably influenced by the local anisotropy, and this implies the significance of the R/T responses analysis for anisotropic media. We have considered the plane interface bounded by two transversely isotropic media with, respectively, vertical and horizontal symmetry axes, and R/T coefficients normalized by the vertical energy flux are obtained in the phase domain. We define two simple anisotropic layered models characterized by fewer independent model parameters. Under the assumption of weak contrast model parameters across the interface, the R/T coefficient approximations are obtained as the perturbations from the simple models’ counterparts. The isotropic background medium is also used to obtain the approximations under an additional weak anisotropy assumption. Compared with approximations degenerated from more general cases, our approximations rely on fewer independent parameters. Numerical tests are implemented to evaluate our approximations.