Finite Difference Elastic Wave Modeling Including Surface Topography

Abstract

Surface topography and the weathered zone (i.e., heterogeneity near the earth’s surface) have great effects on elastic wave propagation. Both surface waves and body waves are contaminated by scattering and conversion by the irregular surface topographic features. In this paper, we present a 2D numerical solver for the elastic wave equation that combines a 4th-order ADER scheme (Arbitrary high-order accuracy using DERivatives) with the characteristic variable method at the free surface boundary. The method is based on the velocity-stress formulation. We demonstrate the method by calculating synthetic seismograms for simple features.