A partial-low-rank method for solving acoustic wave equation

Numerical solutions of the acoustic wave equation, especially in anisotropic media, is crucial to seismic modeling, imaging and inversion as it provides efficient, practical, and stable approximate representation of the medium. However, a clean implementation (free of shear wave artifacts and dispersion) of wave propagation, especially in anisotropic media, requires an integral operator, the direct evaluation of which is extremely expensive. Recently, the low-rank method was proposed to provide a good approximation to the integral operator utilizing Fourier transforms. Thus, we propose to split the integral operator into two terms. The first term provides a differential operator that approximates that can be approximated with a standard finite-difference method. We, then, apply the low-rank approximation on the residual term of the finite-difference operator. We implement the two terms in two complementing steps, in which the spectral step corrects for any errors admitted by the finite difference step. Even though we utilize finite-difference approximations, the resulting algorithm admits spectral accuracy. Also, through the finite difference step, the method can deal approximately with the free surface and absorbing boundary conditions in a straight forward manner. Numerical examples show that the method is of high accuracy and efficiency.