Fundamentals of geophysical data processing. With applications to petroleum prospecting / Основы обработки геофизических данных. С приложениями для поиска нефти

This book is based at the level of a bachelor’s degree in physical science. Experience at Stanford indicates that a one-semester class in engineering systems theory provides helpful additional background. It will be readable to a general science and engineering audience and should be useful to anyone interested in computer modeling and data analysis in physical sciences.

Inevitably, the book is strongly flavored by my own research interests which are presently mainly in reflection seismology. However, I have taken an interest in a good many of the data processing problems in general geophysics that have arisen in eight years of teaching graduate students and supervising research. This book is intended to be a textbook rather than a research monograph. The exercises are of a reasonable degree of difficulty for first-year graduate students, and most of them have been thoroughly tested. Since its first publication in 1976, and subsequent translation to Russian and Chinese, this book has become the most widely-referenced textbook in journal articles on exploration geophysics. No other book gives so complete an account of the fundamentals of geophysical data processing. Recently Blackwell Scientific Publications offered to reprint the book, so I took advantage of the opportunity to rewrite the preface and introduction, and to update the references.

The subject of discrete-time filters is easier than calculus and provides the needed platform, usually provided by calculus, to explore many concepts from physics and engineering. Concepts expressed in discrete time are already prepared for computers, thus engineering and science professionals are no longer diverted by analytic solutions, but by computer methods. Now with computers in every room, a curriculum that leaves every thought expressed in the continuum is simply out of date. The real “new math” should not be set theory but elementary calculus reexpressed in discrete form. <...>