Seismic Waves in Laterally Inhomogeneous Media

This special issue contains contributions presented at the international workshop Seismic Waves in Laterally Inhomogeneous Media V, which was held at the Castle of ZahrAdky, Czech Republic, June 5 - 9, 2000. The workshop, which was attended by about 60 seismologists from 16 countries, was devoted mainly to the current state of theoretical and computational means of study of seismic wave propagation in complex structures. The special issue begins with papers dealing with the study and the application of the ray methods. Problems such as coupling of quasi-shear waves or smoothing of models for effective ray computations are dealt with. Applications of the ray methods in seismic exploration are presented. Further, directional wavefield decomposition, phase space, path integral and parabolic equation methods are discussed. Attention is also devoted to attenuation and scattering problems, and to seismic inversion problems.