An optimal absorbing boundary condition for elastic wave modeling

Absorbing boundary conditions are widely used in numerical modeling of wave propagation in unbounded media to reduce reflections from artificial boundaries (Lindman, 1975; Clayton and Engquist, 1977; Reynolds, 1978; Liao et al., 1984; Cerjan et al., 1985; Randall, 1988; Higdon, 1991). We are interested in a particular absorbing boundary condition that has maximum absorbing ability with a minimum amount of computation and storage. This is practical for 3-D simulation of elastic wave propagation by a finite‐difference method. Peng and Toksoz (1994) developed a method to design a class of optimal absorbing boundary conditions for a given operator length. In this short note, we give a brief introduction to this technique, and we compare the optimal absorbing boundary conditions against those by Reynolds (1978) and Higdon (1991) using examples of 3-D elastic finite‐difference modeling on an nCUBE-2 parallel computer. In the Appendix, we also give explicit formulas for computing coefficients of the optimal abso...