Spatial Mesh Refinement using Cubic Smoothing Spline Interpolation in Simulation of 2-D Elastic Wave Equation: Forward Modeling of Full-waveform Inversion

Abstract

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is a non-destructive health monitoring technique that can be used to identify and quantify the embedded anomalies. The forward modeling of the FWI consists of a simulation of elastic wave equation to generate synthetic data. Thus the accuracy of the FWI method highly depends on the simulation method used in the forward modeling. Simulation of a 3-D seismic survey with small-scale heterogeneities is impossible with the classic finite difference approach even on modern super computers. In this work, we adopted a mesh refinement approach for simulation of the wave equation in the presence of small-scale heterogeneities. This approach uses cubic smoothing spline interpolation for spatial mesh refinement step in solving the wave equation. The simulation results for the 2-D elastic wave equation are presented and compared with the classic finite difference approach.