Simulate the elastic wavefields in media with an irregular surface topography based on staggered grid finite difference

Abstract

Abstract Wave equation forward modeling is a useful method to study the propagation regulation of seismic wavefields. Finite difference (FD) is one of the most extensively employed numerical approaches for computing wavefields in earthquake and exploration seismology. However, the FD approach relying on regular grids often struggles to calculate wavefields in regions featuring surface topographies. The elastic wave equation can more accurately describe the propagation of seismic wavefields in elastic media compared to the acoustic wave equation. We introduce a new FD scheme to calculate the elastic wavefields in an isotropic model with a surface topography. The novel approach can use a conventional staggered grid FD (SGFD) approach based on regular grids. A new elastic model with a horizontal surface is first obtained from the nearby surface's elastic properties and the undulating terrain elevation. We subsequently employ a topography-related strategy to eliminate the effects of surface topographies on the seismic wavefields in models with irregular surface topographies. The merits of our proposed scheme lie in its ability to stable numerically compute wavefields in models with irregular surface topographies without altering the conventional SGFD relying on regular grids. To validate the effectiveness and practicality of our method, we utilize elastic models featuring complex surface topographies. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our approach efficiently calculates elastic wavefields in isotropic media with irregular topographies based on conventional SGFD.