Calibration of absorbing boundary layers for geoacoustic wave modeling in pseudo-spectral time-domain methods

Abstract. This paper develops a calibration methodology of the artificial absorbing techniques typically used by Fourier pseudo-spectral time-domain (PSTD) methods for geoacoustic wave simulations. Specifically, we consider the damped wave equation (DWE) that results from adding a dissipation term to the original wave equation, the sponge boundary layer (SBL) that applies an exponentially decaying factor directly to the wavefields, and finally, a classical split formulation of the perfectly matched layer (PML). These three techniques belong to the same family of absorbing boundary layers (ABLs), where outgoing waves and edge reflections are progressively damped across a grid zone of NABL consecutive layers. The ABLs used are compatible with a pure Fourier formulation of PSTD. We first characterize the three ABLs with respect to multiple sets of NABL and their respective absorption parameters for homogeneous media. Next, we validate our findings in heterogeneous media of increasing complexity, starting with a layered medium and finishing with the SEG/EAGE 3D salt model. Finally, we algorithmically compare the three PSTD–ABL methods in terms of memory demands and computational cost. An interesting result is that PML, despite outperforming the absorption of the other two ABLs for a given NABL value, requires approximately double the computational time. The parameter configurations reported in this paper can be readily used for PSTD simulations in other test cases, and the ABL calibration methodology can be applied to other wave propagation schemes.