9725427 Sen This research involves the investigation of anisotropic parameter estimation from observations of anisotropy in crustal and mantle materials. Forward modeling techniques will be used based on the reflectivity method and global optimization methods such as simulate annealing and genetic algorithms for the parameter estimation problem. Prior analytic and numerical investigations reveal that the dependence of model parameters on seismic data for anisotropic media is highly nonlinear and, therefore, a nonlinear, global optimization method is appropriate for this purpose. Questions addressed include the uniqueness of anisotropy parameters, the type of data needed to determine anisotropy parameters, and the importance of inclusion of anisotropy parameters in a given data set. ***
