Experiments with Higdon's absorbing boundary conditions for a number of wave equations (Q1298838)

Simulation of wave propagation for seismic purposes is discussed. Artificial boundary conditions are required where the subsurface model is truncated. An overview of existing and a few new ideas is presented that may be useful for the construction of suitable boundary conditions. The author restricts his attention to local boundary conditions because the application is to a high-order difference code running on a parallel computer. Higdon's boundary conditions are used. It is shown that third-order conditions provide acceptable results for the simple scalar wave equation and the acoustic equation. In the elastic case an additional low-frequency growing mode may occur. This mode can be suppressed by using a dissipative boundary scheme and by increasing the amount of damping.