The special issue contains contributions presented at the international workshop Seismic waves in laterally inhomogeneous media IV, which was held at the Castle of Trest, Czech Republic, May 22-27, 1995. The workshop, which was attended by about 100 seismologists from more than 10 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 can be of interest for theoretical, global and explorational seismologists. The first part contains papers dealing with the study and the use of various methods of solving forward and inverse problems in complicated structures. Among other methods, discrete-wave number method, the finite-difference method, the edge-wave supperposition method and the ray method are studied and used. Most papers contained in the second part are related to the ray method. The most important topics are two-point ray tracing, grid calculations of travel times and amplitudes and seismic wave propagation in anisotropic media.

Inhalt
Modeling, Ray Tracing, and Block Nonlinear Travel-time Inversion in 3D.- Point-to-curve Ray Tracing.- Two-point Ray Tracing in 3-D.- 3D Multivalued Travel Time and Amplitude Maps.- Wave Front Construction in Smooth Media for Prestack Depth Migration.- Construction of Ray Synthetic Seismograms Using Interpolation of Travel Times and Ray Amplitudes.- Grid Travel-time Tracing: Second-order Method for the First Arrivals in Smooth Media.- Finite-difference Solution of the Transport Equation: First Results.- Theory of Anisotropic Dynamic Ray Tracing in Ray-centred Coordinates.- Point Source Radiation in Inhomogeneous Anisotropic Structures.- Birefringence Parameters: Indicators of Anisotropic Symmetry Systems.- Nonlinear Ray Perturbation Theory with its Applications to Ray Tracing and Inversion in Anisotropic Media.- Weak-contrast Approximation of the Elastic Scattering Matrix in An-isotropic Media.