DECOUPLING OF P AND S WAVES IN INHOMOGENEOUS ELASTIC MEDIA

Summary. A representation derived by Richards (1974) for P‐SV wave displacements in spherically symmetric elastic media is extended to general displacements in a general inhomogeneous isotropic elastic medium, with suitably differentiable elastic constants. This representation in terms of appropriate potentials gives rise to a partial decoupling of the P and S (weighted) displacements, which satisfy simple second order wave equations with lower order coupling terms. The highest order P and S components satisfy homogeneous wave equations that depend only on the P and S velocities α and β respectively and are unaffected by the density other than at the source and observer positions. Copyright © 1979, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reserved