Simulating Multicomponent Elastic Seismic Wavefield Using Deep Learning

Abstract

Simulating seismic wave propagation by solving the wave equation is one of the most fundamental topics in applied geophysics. Considering the elastic nature of the Earth, it is important to simulate the elastic behavior of seismic waves. Compared to solving the acoustic wave equation, it often requires a larger computational cost to solve the elastic wave equation. For the finite-difference method, the computational cost for simulating elastic wavefields increases greatly to include multiple wavefield components. We propose to solve the scattered form of the frequency-domain elastic wave equation using a deep learning framework, called physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). PINNs use the physics principles (scattered elastic wave equations in our case) as the loss function. By inputting the spatial model coordinates and source locations into the network, we can evaluate the wavefield solutions of vertical and horizontal displacements in the domain of interest for arbitrary source locations. We demonstrate that this newly developed deep-learning based method can simulate multi-component elastic wavefields with reasonable accuracy.