One-dimensional inversion of seismograms

Seismic exploration attempts to recover the acoustic structure of the earth from observations made at the accessible surface. Depositional history often makes a plane-layered model a reasonable first approximation to the structure. Field techniques do not correspond to the use of plane waves, but a method of extracting the equivalent of such observation from data will be discussed. Thus it is of interest to consider the inversion problem for this one-dimensional case. One method for performing such an inversion will be presented, and attendant problems will be discussed.