Plane-wave reflection coelficients PWRCs are routinely used in amplitude-variation-with-offset analysis and for generating boundary data in Kirchhoff modeling. However, the geometrical-seismics approximation based on PWRCs becomes inadequate in describing reflected wavefields at near- and postcritical incidence angles. Also, PWRCs are derived for plane interfaces and break down in the presence of significant reflector curvature. Here, we discuss effective reflection coeficients ERCs de signed to overcome the limitations of PWRCs for multicomponent data from heterogeneous anisotropic media. We represent the reflected wavefield in the immediate vicinity of a curved interface by a generalized plane-wave decomposition, which approximately reduces to the conventional Weyl-type integral computed for an apparent source location. The ERC then is obtained as the ratio of the reflected and incident wavefields at each point of the interface. To conduct diffraction modeling, we combine ERCs with the tip-wave superposition method TWSM, extended to elastic media. This methodology is implemented for curved interfaces that separate an isotropic incidence half-space and a transversely isotropic TI medium with the symmetry axis orthogonal to the reflector. If the interface is plane, ERCs generally are close to the exact solution, sensitive to the anisotropy parameters and source-receiver geometry. Numerical tests demonstrate that the difference between ERCs and PWRCs for typical TI models can be significant, especially at low frequencies and in the postcritical domain. For curved interfaces, ERCs provide a practical approximate tool to compute the reflected wavefield. We analyze the dependence of ERCs on reflector shape and demonstrate their advantages over PWRCs in 3D diffraction modeling of PP and PS reflection data.
