Simulation of elastic wave propagation in geological media: Intercomparison of three numerical methods

For wave propagation in heterogeneous media, we compare numerical results produced by grid-characteristic methods on structured rectangular and unstructured triangular meshes and by a discontinuous Galerkin method on unstructured triangular meshes as applied to the linear system of elasticity equations in the context of direct seismic exploration with an anticlinal trap model. It is shown that the resulting synthetic seismograms are in reasonable quantitative agreement. The grid-characteristic method on structured meshes requires more nodes for approximating curved boundaries, but it has a higher computation speed, which makes it preferable for the given class of problems.