Accurate 3D frequency-domain seismic wave modeling with the wavelength-adaptive 27-point finite-difference stencil: A tool for full-waveform inversion

Abstract

Efficient frequency-domain full-waveform inversion (FWI) of long-offset node data can be performed with a few frequencies. The seismic response of these frequencies can be computed with compact finite-difference stencils on regular Cartesian grid with direct or hybrid direct/iterative methods. Compactness, which is necessary to mitigate the fill-in induced by the lower-upper factorization, is implemented with second-order stencils, whereas accuracy is achieved by building a consistent mass matrix and a compound stiffness matrix with optimal weights so that the stencil covers the eight cells surrounding the central point, leading to a 27-point stencil. Classical approaches estimate constant weights by jointly minimizing numerical dispersion in homogeneous media for several numbers of grid points per wavelength ([Formula: see text]). Then, the impedance matrix is built by using these constant weights at each central point covering the heterogeneous subsurface model, leading to nonuniform wavefield accuracy. Instead, we estimate [Formula: see text]-dependent weights once and for all by minimizing dispersion separately for each value of [Formula: see text] in a range found in FWI applications. Then, we build the impedance matrix without computational overhead by selecting at each central point the weights corresponding to the local [Formula: see text], hence leading to a wavelength-adaptive stencil. This separate approach with adaptive weights makes wavefield accuracy uniform. We benchmark wavefields, which are computed in several 3D large-scale subsurface models with a sparse multifrontal direct solver and the nonadaptive/adaptive stencils, against analytical solutions when available and the highly accurate discretization-free convergent Born series method. Each benchmark reveals the higher accuracy of the adaptive stencil relative to the nonadaptive one. In the presence of sharp contrasts, the adaptive stencil also is more accurate than a classical [Formula: see text] finite-different time-domain staggered-grid stencil. The relevance of the adaptive stencil is finally illustrated with a 3D FWI case study in the 3.5–13 Hz frequency band.