Seismic polarization is investigated for near-surface reflection data with the development of two processing tools. The first tool uses a Red-Blue-Green colour map to visualize the results of principal component analysis. The second tool is a method to estimate time-dependent time-shift from trace to trace in a seismic gather. The method makes use of changes in the phase content of the two signals. Compared to other methods such as Dynamic Time-warping it is more robust to noise, but more vulnerable to aliasing. When incorporated into the velocity independent processing framework, zero-offset sections can be produced in a fully automated fashion, which is particularly useful for multicomponent data sets. Combining these processing tools allows for the polarization to be visualized on the scale of survey, and the resulting polarization from different source orientations can be compared conveniently.