Anelastic sensitivity kernels with parsimonious storage for adjoint tomography and full waveform inversion

Dimitri Komatitsch (1) , Zhinan Xie (1, 2) , Ebru Bozdag (3) , Elliott Sales De Andrade (4) , Daniel Peter (5) , Qinya Liu (4) , Jeroen Tromp (6)

1 LMA - Laboratoire de Mécanique et d'Acoustique [Marseille]
2 Institute of Engineering Mechanics - China Earthquake Administration
3 GEOAZUR 7329 - Géoazur
4 University of Toronto
5 KAUST - King Abdullah University of Science and Technology [Saudi Arabia]
6 Department of Geosciences [Princeton]

We introduce a technique to compute exact anelastic sensitivity kernels in the time domain using parsimonious disk storage. The method is based on a reordering of the time loop of time-domain forward/adjoint wave propagation solvers combined with the use of a memory buffer. It avoids instabilities that occur when time-reversing dissipative wave propagation simulations. The total number of required time steps is unchanged compared to usual acoustic or elastic approaches. The cost is reduced by a factor of 4/3 compared to the case in which anelasticity is partially accounted for by accommodating the effects of physical dispersion. We validate our technique by performing a test in which we compare the Kα sensitivity kernel to the exact kernel obtained by saving the entire forward calculation. This benchmark confirms that our approach is also exact. We illustrate the importance of including full attenuation in the calculation of sensitivity kernels by showing significant differences with physical-dispersion-only kernels.

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]; Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]; Géophysique [physics.geo-ph]

Dimitri Komatitsch, Zhinan Xie, Ebru Bozdag, Elliott Sales De Andrade, Daniel Peter, et al.. Anelastic sensitivity kernels with parsimonious storage for adjoint tomography and full waveform inversion. Geophysical Journal International, 2016, 206 (3), pp.1467-1478. ⟨10.1093/gji/ggw224⟩. ⟨hal-01321920⟩