Numerical modeling with high performance computing of seismic waves for complex marine environments: Benchmarking with laboratory experiments

Abstract

Numerical simulations are widely used for forward and inverse problems in seismic exploration to investigate different wave propagation phenomena. However, the numerical results are hard to be compared to real seismic measurements as the subsurface is never exactly known. Using laboratory measurements for small-scale physical models can provide a valuable link between purely numerical and real seismic datasets. We present a case study for comparing ultrasonic data for a complex model with spectral-element and finite-difference synthetic results. The small-scale model was immersed in a water tank. Reflection data was recorded with piezoelectric transducers using a conventional pulse-echo technique. We paid special attention to the implementation of the real source signal—and radiation pattern—in the numerical domain. It involved a laboratory calibration measurement, followed by an inversion process. The model geometry was implemented using a non-structured mesh for the spectral-element simulations. The comparisons show a very good fit between synthetic and laboratory traces in general, and the small discrepancies can be assigned mostly to the noise present in the laboratory data.