A Phase-velocity Based Ray Tracing System for Anisotropic Media

The ray tracing system formulated in terms of elastic stiffness parameters needs to solve a complicated eigenvalue problem for calculating traveltime at each ray step. Also, the elastic stiffness parameters in anisotropic media are inconsistent with Thomsen parameters which have straightforward geophysical meaning. These will lead to be tedious in the process of performing ray tracing. Based on the anisotropic ray tracing system expressed by phase velocity, the paper proposes a new ray tracing system in anisotropic media through some further simplification. We derive the new approximate qP wave phase velocity formula by using a linear approximation to C13 and perform ray tracing in some typical anisotropic media. The theoretical analysis and numerical experiment demonstrate that, the new form of ray tracing system has a wider flexibility and applicability, owing to the fact that both computational accuracy and numerical stability are higher than traditional ray tracing system.