Abstract:The surface wave is treated as interference wave in oil seismic prospecting,however,the Rayleigh wave,like the refraction and reflection waves,contains the information of underground medium.The purpose of the paper is to discuss the feasibility of using the available surface wave in seismic prospecting for investigation of near-surface structure.The main thoughts of the method are:①separate Rayleigh wave from seismic data by using 2-D f-k transform or wavelet package transform;②calculate the dispersive curves from separated Rayleigh wave;③solve the near-surface structure from the dispersive curves.The results of theoretical analysis of two-layer model and real cases showed that using Rayleigh wave to investigate the near-surface structure is feasible.It is possible to provide a new tool for studying the near-surface structure by making full use of the Rayleigh wave information.