Reverse Time Migration of Elastic Waves Using the Pseudospectral Time-Domain Method

Abstract

Reverse time migration (RTM), especially that for elastic waves, consumes massive computation resources which limit its wide applications in industry. We suggest to use the pseudospectral time-domain (PSTD) method in elastic wave RTM. RTM using PSTD can significantly reduce the computational requirements compared with RTM using the traditional finite difference time domain method (FDTD). In addition to the advantage of low sampling rate with high accuracy, the PSTD method also eliminates the periodicity (or wraparound) limitation caused by fast Fourier transform in the conventional pseudospectral method. To achieve accurate results, the PSTD method needs only about half the spatial sampling rate of the twelfth-order FDTD method. Thus, the PSTD method can save up to 87.5% storage memory and 90% computation time over the twelfth-order FDTD method. We implement RTM using PSTD for elastic wave equations and accelerate it by Open Multi-Processing technology. To keep the computational load balance in parallel computation, we design a new PML layout which merges the PML in both ends of an axis together. The efficiency and imaging quality of the proposed RTM is verified by imaging on 2D and 3D models.