A Stable Finite Difference Method for the Elastic Wave Equation on Complex Geometries with Free Surfaces

Abstract

A stable and explicit second order accurate finite difference method for the elastic wave equation in curvilinear coordinates is presented. The discretization of the spatial operators in the method is shown to be self-adjoint for free-surface, Dirichlet and periodic boundary conditions. The fully discrete version of the method conserves a discrete energy to machine precision.