f An analysis of the error in conventional AVO-inversion for laterally varying media

The reflection operator is defined as the functional behaviour between the scattered and the incident wavefield. In general, this reflection function is dependent on space and time and is directly related to the material characteristics of the medium. So far, an explicit exact expression for the reflection operator has only been derived for two homogeneous halfspaces. This is the reason that in conventional AVO-inversion, typically carried out per common midpoint-gather, a (locally) lateral invariant medium is assumed. The aim of this paper is to investigate the errors resulting from this assumption.