An inversion method designed for the identification of lithologic and stratigraphic parameters from prestack surface data is presented in this paper. ‘I’he earth model is assumed to be horizontally stratified for each common mid-point gather but it could vary for each CMP gather. Different images of the subsurface arc obtained by an inversion of the different plane-wave components available in the data. The analysis of the variations observed between these different images provides useful information on the variation of the reflectivity with the angle of the incident wave (RVA analysis). The application of this inversion on marine field data shows sig$cant improvements with respect to standard post-stack processing. These improvements are mainly related to the ability of the inversion process to account for complex wave phenomena. In particular, source related effects and multiples are removed from the computed reflectivities.