Abstract: Many features of reef in seismic time profile were numerically simulated by the way of F-K wave equation modeling to effectively recognize seismic response features of reef. A calculation program by combining seismic forward with depth migration was proposed to test the explanation for reef. Based on the 2-D seismic modeling, the continuation method of 3-D wave equation was applied to realize poststack forward modeling of 3-D atoll model. Many representative response features in different seismic profiles were obtained. The simulated synthetic records only contain the primary reflections and diffractions with high signal-to-noise ratio, which is available for eliminating the multiplicity of reef seismic interpretation.