Forward and adjoint simulations of seismic wave propagation on fully unstructured hexahedral meshes

Daniel Peter (1) , Dimitri Komatitsch (2, 3, 4) , Yang Luo (1) , Roland Martin (2, 3) , Nicolas Le Goff (2, 5) , Emanuele Casarotti (6) , Pieyre Le Loher (2) , Federica Magnoni (6) , Qinya Liu (7) , Céline Blitz (2) , Tarje Nissen-Meyer (8) , Piero Basini (8) , Jeroen Tromp (9)

1 Princeton University
2 Magique 3D - Advanced 3D Numerical Modeling in Geophysics
3 GET - Géosciences Environnement Toulouse
4 IUF - Institut universitaire de France
5 MIGP - Laboratoire de Modélisation et d'Imagerie en Géosciences de Pau
6 INGV - Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia - Sezione di Roma
7 University of Toronto
8 ETH Zürich - Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology [Zürich]
9 Department of Geosciences [Princeton]

We present forward and adjoint spectral-element simulations of coupled acoustic and (an)elastic seismic wave propagation on fully unstructured hexahedral meshes. Simulations benefit from recent advances in hexahedral meshing, load balancing and software optimization. Meshing may be accomplished using a mesh generation tool kit such as CUBIT, and load balancing is facilitated by graph partitioning based on the SCOTCH library. Coupling between fluid and solid regions is incorporated in a straightforward fashion using domain decomposition. Topography, bathymetry and Moho undulations may be readily included in the mesh, and physical dispersion and attenuation associated with anelasticity are accounted for using a series of standard linear solids. Finite-frequency Fr'echet derivatives are calculated using adjoint methods in both fluid and solid domains. The software is benchmarked for a layercake model. We present various examples of fully unstructured meshes, snapshots of wavefields and finite-frequency kernels generated by Version 2.0 'Sesame' of our widely used open source spectral-element package SPECFEM3D.

Mots clés: Computational seismology; Tomography; Interferometry; Wave propagation; Wave propagation.

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Daniel Peter, Dimitri Komatitsch, Yang Luo, Roland Martin, Nicolas Le Goff, et al.. Forward and adjoint simulations of seismic wave propagation on fully unstructured hexahedral meshes. Geophysical Journal International, 2011, 186, pp.721-739. ⟨10.1111/j.1365-246X.2011.05044.x⟩. ⟨hal-00617249⟩