The AWWE-based hybrid absorbing boundary condition for finite-difference modeling and its application in reverse-time migration

Abstract

The reverse-time migration (RTM) crosscorrelation imaging condition requires that the forward-propagated source wavefield and the backward-propagated receiver wavefield must be obtained at the same time. The easiest way to get the source wavefield is to save the entire time history of the full wavefield into computer memory. However, this strategy requires huge amount of data storage. It is impossible for large-scale 3D RTM. To reduce the computer memory cost, the back-propagated source wavefield is reconstructed by using the stored boundary wavefield. Its computer memory is proportional to the saved boundary grid points. For high order of spatial finite-difference (FD) schemes, more boundary grid points are needed to be stored, which consumes a large amount of the computer memory required for RTM. To further reduce the computer memory cost, we adopt the hybrid absorbing boundary condition (ABC) combined with the arbitrarily wide-angle wave equations (AWWEs). In our method, three boundary grid points can obtain good absorption. The source wavefield can be accurately reconstructed by using these points and the mirror-image symmetry method. Numerical experiments demonstrate the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed method. We compared our method with the conventional hybrid ABC method based on the 15°one way wave equations (OWWEs). Comparisons show that our method with three boundary grid points can achieve the same absorption as the conventional method with ten boundary grid points. For twentieth order of accuracy in space, our method uses only about 30% of memory requirement and about 59% of computation time required by the conventional method.