CONCLUSION

Refraction statics work well when the first arrivals are actually refracted head waves. In mountainous terrain the presence of transmitted arrivals causes erroneous thickening of the low velocity layer in elevated regions. This causes substantial errors to arise in the statics calculated from these erroneous solutions.

Transmitted arrivals and the unique nature of the acquisition geometry in mountainous terrain must be taken into account to perform proper statics corrections. In order to properly image data from mountainous regions, a different approach to the problem must be devised. It is possible to implement refraction inversion programs which account for transmitted arrivals. A more interesting approach might be to perform a tomographic reconstruction of the near surface velocity structure and use that result to shift the data to datum. Yet another approach would be to perform the imaging and velocity analysis along trajectories which reflect the topography instead of along hyperbolas.