Hybrid absorbing boundary condition based on transmitting boundary and its application in 3D fractional viscoacoustic modeling

An accurate numerical simulation for wave equations is essential for understanding of wave propagation in the earth's interior as well as full waveform inversion and reverse time migration. However, due to computational cost and hardware capability limitations, numerical simulations are often performed within a finite domain. Thus, an adequate absorbing boundary condition (ABC) is indispensable for obtaining accurate numerical simulation results. In this study, we develop a hybrid ABC based on a transmitting boundary, which is referred to as THABC, to eliminate artificial boundary reflections in 3D second-order fractional viscoacoustic numerical simulations. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive weighted coefficient to reconcile the transmitting and viscoacoustic wavefields in THABC. Through several numerical examples, we determine that the proposed THABC approach is characterized by the following benefits. First, with the same number of absorbing layers, THABC exhibits a better ability in eliminating boundary reflection than traditional ABC schemes. Second, THABC is more effective in computation, since it only requires the wavefields at the current and last time steps to solve the transmitting formula within the absorbing layers. Benefiting from a simple but effective combination between the transmitting equation and the second-order wave equation, our scheme performs well in the 3D fractional Laplacian viscoacoustic numerical simulation.