In this paper, we investigate the formal inversion of synthetic teleseismic P coda waves for subsurface elastic properties using a ray theoretic approach which assumes single scattering <Bostock et al., this issue>. We consider a model comprising an idealized lithospheric suture zone whose geometrical configuration is drawn from previous deep crustal seismic studies. Two-dimensional, pseudospectral synthetic seismograms representing plane waves propagating through this model are preprocessed to extract an estimate of the scattered wave field generated by short-wavelength structure. These data are employed in a series of numerical simulations which examine the dependence of multiparameter inversion results on a range of input parameters. In particular, we demonstrate (1) the contrasting sensitivity which forward and backscattered waves display to structural recovery, (2) the diminution of the problem null-space accompanied by increased source coverage, (3) improvements in model reconstruction achieved through simultaneous treatment of multiple scattering modes, and (4) the robustness of the method for data sets with noise levels and receiver geometries that approach those of field experiments. ¿ 2001 American Geophysical Union