Seismic Modeling in Anisotropic Medium with Topography by a Full Staggered-grid Finite-difference Method on Body-fitted

Abstract

Seismic modeling plays an irreplaceable fundamental role in the exploration of oil and gas resources. Due to its straightforward implementation, small memory and computational costs, finite-difference method (FDM) has been widely used in computational seismology. However, FDM is known to have difficulties reproducing properly the properties of the free-surface condition. Moreover, the topography is poorly represented by regular Cartesian grids. We present a novel FD scheme which can solve accurately seismic wave propagation in anisotropic medium with irregular free surface. The method is based upon the Fully Staggered Grid combined with body-fitted grid to honor the topography and a mimetic solution for the free-surface condition. Numerical tests verify that our method can obtain results with very few points per wavelength when compared to other similar approaches. Furthermore, no explicit meshing is required in order to set up the models, which adds to the robustness and simplicity of the scheme.