We react to an increasing interest in seismic exploration to study media of tilted and/or lower anisotropic symmetry and study if, under what conditions, and to which extent, it is possible to retrieve information about anisotropy from the traveltime data. We concentrate on a vertical seismic profiling (VSP) experiment, which provides a good angular illumination of the anisotropic medium. In order to simplify the problem, we use synthetic P-wave traveltime data generated in homogeneous models of weakly or moderately anisotropic media. The use of the weak-anisotropy parameterization reduces the number of the so-called weak-anisotropy (WA) parameters specifying the most general P-wave anisotropy to 15. We study effects of traveltime approximation, varying noise level and the experiment configuration on the quality of the recovery of the WA parameters. We show that the used parameterization of the model may even allow the reconstruction of the phase-velocity surface.
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