Description of Near Surface Geological Structures Combining Refracted and Reflected Seismic Data

We present in this paper a method for integrating both refracted and reflected seismic data in order to describe in 2D or 3D near surface geological structures. The processing of refracted data is done by tomographic inversion. The tomographic inversion to be successful needs to start with an initial model close to the best solutions. We apply the conventional Plus–Minus method to produce such initial model. We also show the benefit of processing the shot points recorded for the refraction survey in order to obtain Very High Resolution seismic sections in single fold to extend in time or depth the velocity model computed by tomographic inversion. The processing of reflected data requires a particular attention for reducing the coherent noise created by surface waves. Two field examples, in 2D and 3D, illustrate the performance of the proposed procedure.