An efficient finite-difference method with high-order accuracy in both time and space domains for modelling scalar-wave propagation

Abstract

For modelling large-scale 3-D scalar-wave propagation, the finite-difference (FD) method with high-order accuracy in space but second-order accuracy in time is widely used because of its relatively low requirements of computer memory. We develop a novel staggered-grid (SG) FD method with high-order accuracy not only in space, but also in time, for solving 2- and 3-D scalar-wave equations. We determine the coefficients of the FD operator in the joint time-space domain to achieve high-order accuracy in time while preserving high-order accuracy in space. Our new FD scheme is based on a stencil that contains a few more grid points than the standard stencil. It is 2<it>M</it>-th-order accurate in space and fourth-order accurate in time when using 2<it>M</it> grid points along each axis and wavefields at one time step as the standard SGFD method. We validate the accuracy and efficiency of our new FD scheme using dispersion analysis and numerical modelling of scalar-wave propagation in 2- and 3-D complex models with a wide range of velocity contrasts. For media with a velocity contrast up to five, our new FD scheme is approximately two times more computationally efficient than the standard SGFD scheme with almost the same computer-memory requirement as the latter. Further numerical experiments demonstrate that our new FD scheme loses its advantages over the standard SGFD scheme if the velocity contrast is 10. However, for most large-scale geophysical applications, the velocity contrasts often range approximately from 1 to 3. Our new method is thus particularly useful for large-scale 3-D scalar-wave modelling and full-waveform inversion.