Ray tracing of turning wave in elliptically anisotropic media with an irregular surface

Abstract

Seismic ray tracing in anisotropic media with irregular surface is crucial for the exploration of the fine crustal structure. Elliptically anisotropic medium is the type of anisotropic media with only four independent elastic parameters. Usually, this medium can be described by only the vertical phase velocity and the horizontal phase velocity for seismic wave propagation. Model parameterization in this study is described by flexible triangular grids, which is beneficial for the description of irregular surface with high degree of approximation. Both the vertical and horizontal phase velocities are defined in the triangular grids, respectively, which are used for the description of phase velocity distribution everywhere in the model by linear interpolation. We develop a shooting ray tracing method of turning wave in the elliptically anisotropic media with irregular surface. Runge-Kutta method is applied to solve the partial differential equation of seismic ray in elliptically anisotropic media. Linearly modified method is used for adjusting emergent phase angles in the shooting scheme. Numerical tests demonstrate that ray paths coincide well with analytical trajectories in transversely homogeneous elliptically anisotropic media. Seismic ray tracing results in transversely inhomogeneous elliptically anisotropic media demonstrate that our method is effective for further first-arrival tomography in elliptically anisotropic media with an irregular surface.