Seismic Wave Propagation for Complex Rheologies

Seismic waves are produced whenever a large amount of energy is released under the surface of the Earth, for example when earthquakes occur. Such waves are perturbed by the heterogeneities they find in their travel through the subsurface, from hypocenter to seismometer. In the last decades, the increase in computational power has made it possible to simulate the propagation of seismic waves in fully 3D heterogeneous media. However, the subsoil often displays very complicated geometrical structures which are difficult to nest by nowadays simulation methods. The ADER-DG (Arbitrary high-order DERivatives Discontinuous Galerkin) method provides the means to better represent subsoil geological structures using tetrahedral meshes. Such meshes can be easily deformed and adapted to very complicated geometries such as folded layers, faults and shallow basins. In this book the ADER-DG method is developed for problems of elastodynamics and further extended to accommodate anisotropic, viscoelastic and poroelastic rheologies. For all cases examples are provided to verify the fast convergence properties and to show the precision of the synthetic seismograms computed.