Comparison of Two Staggered-Grid Finite-difference Schemes for Elastic Wave Propagation in Anisotropic Media on GPU Devices

The anisotropic elastic wave equations can be used to stimulate the attributes of wave traveling through the earth more precisely than acoustic approximations. However, the first-order derivatives calculated by conventional finite-difference method leads to lots of artifacts on the modeling results, which would damage the imaging results of reverse time migration. We have employed rotated staggered-grid finite-difference techniques on second-order system and obtained obvious improvements of the modeling results. Most importantly, we make comparisons of our new scheme and classical staggered-grid scheme in accuracy, memory requirements and acceleration performance aspects, respectively. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our new scheme has comparable accuracy and speedup with classical one. Hence, we provide a feasible and alternative scheme for anisotropic elastic wave modeling, which is essential to reverse time migration imaging.