Wide-angle incidence and P-wave transmission

Polarity reversals may occur to transmitted P waves if the incidence angle is greater than the critical incidence angle. We analyze the characteristics of reflection and transmission coefficients under the condition of wide incidence angle based on Zoeppritz equations. We find that for specific conditions, as the incidence angle increases, the characteristic curve of the transmitted P-wave coefficient enters the third quadrant from the first quadrant through the origin, which produces a transition in the transmitted P wave and the corresponding coefficient experiences polarity reversal. We derive the incidence angle when the transmitted P-wave coefficient is zero and verify that it equals zero by using finite-difference forward modeling for a single-interface model. We replace the water in the model reservoir by gas and see that the reservoir P-wave velocity and density decrease dramatically. By analyzing the synthetic seismogram of the transmitted P wave in the single-interface model, we show that the gas-saturated reservoir is responsible for polarity reversal.