Reply by the authors to Douglas W. McCowan
In his discussion, McGowan directs his attention exclusively to which method should be used to produce a plane-wave decomposition of point-source seismic data. Although the choice of method is an important point, it was not the main emphasis of our paper which, as its title indicates, was the comparison between plane-wave decomposition (cylindrical slant stacking) and simple slant stacking. We demonstrated the differences between these two processes and clearly indicated the necessity of using cylindrical slant stacking in order to get the correct plane-wave reflection response of point-source data. McGowan criticizes our method because it makes use of the standard asymptotic approximation of the Bessel function [Formula: see text] and considers only outward traveling waves. In our paper we acknowledged that these simplifications do not produce accurate results for ray parameters near zero and explicitly mentioned the method of Brysk and McGowan (1986) as a suitable alternative to deal with this problem.