Time–space domain scalar wave modeling by a novel hybrid staggered-grid finite-difference method with high temporal and spatial accuracies

Abstract

Staggered-grid finite-difference (SFD) scheme is favored in wave equation simulation due to its superior accuracy and stability to center-grid finite-difference (CFD) scheme. However, for the scalar wave equation (SWE) modeling, the conventional SFD (CSFD) scheme only reaches second-order accuracy in space and time for the discrete SWE; the recently developed modified SFD (MSFD) scheme improves the accuracy to (2N)th-order (N<4) but is costly because the MSFD scheme is coined by adding many extra grid points to the CSFD scheme. To tackle these issues, we develop a cost-effective hybrid SFD (HSFD) scheme, which combines the features of the CSFD and MSFD schemes; we prove that the new HSFD scheme can simultaneously reach (2N)th-order accuracy in space and time for the discrete wave equation. In addition, to deal with the optimization difficulties due to the nonlinear dispersion relation of the SFD schemes, we propose a two-step linear optimization method to improve the accuracy of the new HSFD scheme. The analyses on dispersion, stability properties and numerical simulation examples demonstrate that the new HSFD scheme owns better accuracy and stability than the CSFD scheme. Computational cost analysis shows that the HSFD scheme can be more efficient than the MSFD scheme because it only requires half the additional grid points.