Optimal fourth-order staggered-grid finite-difference scheme for 3D frequency-domain viscoelastic wave modeling

We investigate an optimal fourth-order staggered-grid finite-difference scheme for 3D frequency-domain viscoelastic wave modeling. An anti-lumped mass strategy is incorporated to minimize the numerical dispersion. The optimal finite-difference coefficients and the mass weighting coefficients are obtained by minimizing the misfit between the normalized phase velocities and the unity. An iterative damped least-squares method, the Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm, is utilized for the optimization. Dispersion analysis shows that the optimal fourth-order scheme presents less grid dispersion and anisotropy than the conventional fourth-order scheme with respect to different Poisson's ratios. Moreover, only 3.7 grid-points per minimum shear wavelength are required to keep the error of the group velocities below 1%. The memory cost is then greatly reduced due to a coarser sampling. A parallel iterative method named CARP-CG is used to solve the large ill-conditioned linear system for the frequency-domain modeling. Validations are conducted with respect to both the analytic viscoacoustic and viscoelastic solutions. Compared with the conventional fourth-order scheme, the optimal scheme generates wavefields having smaller error under the same discretization setups. Profiles of the wavefields are presented to confirm better agreement between the optimal results and the analytic solutions.