Modeling of rayleigh-wave propagation in three-dimensional media with topography using staggered-grid finite difference scheme

There is one wave which is spread only along the free-surface and produced under the intervene effection of P-wave and SV-wave near the free-surface named Rayleigh-wave. Its existence was strictly proved and its propagation property was studied first by Lord Rayleigh. Since its energy is very strong, in earthquake, it is the most damaging wave. Numerical simulation is one of most important research method of seismic and seismology. There is one key problem of simulating Rayleigh-wave propagating in half-space media with topography, which is how to realize the free-surface condition in seismic numerical modeling. The AEA method which was first given by XU to solve the numerical realizing problem of 2D plane free-surface in his paper in 2007 was used with step approximate method to solve the topography free-surface numerical problem. 2D and 3D half space model with topography was modeling with staggered-grid finite-difference method and the new scheme for topography free-surface realizing. And the effect of the topography for Rayleigh-wave propagation is analyzed based the numerical simulation results.