Nonreflecting boundary condition in finite-element formulation for an elastic wave equation

Numerical modeling of seismic wavefields using finite-difference or finite-element methods requires truncation of the model to finite computational domains. It is well known that the edges of such truncated models give boundary reflections on the synthetic seismograms, An essential step to successful numerical modeling is to eliminate these reflections. We present a simple scheme that eliminates such boundary reflections when computing synthetics. We also demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of our method on a variety of geological models.