Numerical modeling of seismic waves using frequency-adaptive meshes

•We present a new seismic modeling scheme using frequency-adaptive meshes.•The adaptive meshes meet computational requirements of different frequencies.•The wave propagation angle is a key factor for seismic processing.•Fine meshes cause incorrect wave propagation angles of low-frequency components.•The theory can be adopted by most frequency-domain propagators.

An improved modeling algorithm using frequency-adaptive meshes is applied to meet the computational requirements of all seismic frequency components. It automatically adopts coarse meshes for low-frequency computations and fine meshes for high-frequency computations. The grid intervals are adaptively calculated based on a smooth inversely proportional function of grid size with respect to the frequency. In regular grid-based methods, the uniform mesh or non-uniform mesh is used for frequency-domain wave propagators and it is fixed for all frequencies. A too coarse mesh results in inaccurate high-frequency wavefields and unacceptable numerical dispersion; on the other hand, an overly fine mesh may cause storage and computational overburdens as well as invalid propagation angles of low-frequency wavefields. Experiments on the Padé generalized screen propagator indicate that the Adaptive mesh effectively solves these drawbacks of regular fixed-mesh methods, thus accurately computing the wavefield and its propagation angle in a wide frequency band. Several synthetic examples also demonstrate its feasibility for seismic modeling and migration.