Stable discontinuous grid implementation for collocated-grid finite-difference seismic wave modelling

Simulating seismic waves with uniform grid in heterogeneous high-velocity contrast media requires small-grid spacing determined by the global minimal velocity, which leads to huge number of grid points and small time step. To reduce the computational cost, discontinuous grids that use a finer grid at the shallow low-velocity region and a coarser grid at high-velocity regions are needed. In this paper, we present a discontinuous grid implementation for the collocated-grid finite-difference (FD) methods to increase the efficiency of seismic wave modelling. The grid spacing ratio n could be an arbitrary integer n >= 2. To downsample the wavefield from the finer grid to the coarser grid, our implementation can simply take the values on the finer grid without employing a downsampling filter for grid spacing ratio n = 2 to achieve stable results for long-time simulation. For grid spacing ratio n >= 3, the Gaussian filter should be used as the downsampling filter to get a stable simulation. To interpolate the wavefield from the coarse grid to the finer grid, the trilinear interpolation is used. Combining the efficiency of discontinuous grid with the flexibility of collocated-grid FD method on curvilinear grids, our method can simulate large-scale high-frequency strong ground motion of real earthquake with consideration of surface topography.