A new staggered grid finite difference scheme optimised in the space domain for the first order acoustic wave equation

Abstract

Staggered grid finite difference (FD) methods are widely used to synthesise seismograms theoretically, and are also the basis of reverse time migration and full waveform inversion. Grid dispersion is one of the key problems for FD methods. It is desirable to have a FD scheme which can accelerate wave equation simulation while still preserving high accuracy. In this paper, we propose a totally new staggered grid FD scheme which uses different staggered grid FD operators for different first order spatial derivatives in the first order acoustic wave equation. We determine the FD coefficient in the space domain with the least-squares method. The dispersion analysis and numerical simulation demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this paper, we propose a new finite difference (FD) scheme which uses different staggered grid FD operators for different first order spatial derivatives in the first order acoustic wave equation. The dispersion analysis and numerical simulation demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

• acoustic wave equation
• finite difference scheme
• finite difference time domain
• numerical dispersion
• staggered grid.

Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers’ kind comments and suggestions which improved the paper. This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant numbers 91630202, 41704120 and 41674114, the Fujian Science and Technology Department under grant number 2016J05104, Scientific Research Foundation of Longyan University for Doctors under grant number LB2014010 and Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Science (grant number XDB10020100).