We consider several examples demonstrating that the formal modal representation of surface wavefields often does not describe adequately observable wave parameters, such as the phase and group velocity dispersion of higher modes. The main reason for this is the existence in the medium of several waveguides or weakly coupled wavefields in the same waveguide. In such cases the separation of neighboring higher modes may be impossible, and observed dispersion curves may significantly differ from the ones predicted by the theory. From the example related to the studies of the crustal and upper mantle structure we found that the difficulty in the separation of first and second crustal higher modes can be overcome by applying a special inversion procedure. This procedure ignores the existence of a low velocity layer in the upper mantle when fitting the observable higher-mode dispersion curve to the one predicted by the model.
