An improved rotated staggered-grid finite-difference method with fourth-order temporal accuracy for elastic-wave modeling in anisotropic media

The rotated staggered-grid (RSG) finite-difference method is a powerful tool for elastic-wave modeling in 2D anisotropic media where the symmetry axes of anisotropy are not aligned with the coordinate axes. We develop an improved RSG scheme with fourth-order temporal accuracy to reduce the numerical dispersion associated with prolonged wave propagation or a large temporal step size. The high-order temporal accuracy is achieved by including high-order temporal derivatives, which can be converted to high-order spatial derivatives to reduce computational cost. Dispersion analysis and numerical tests show that our method exhibits very low temporal dispersion even with a large temporal step size for elastic-wave modeling in complex anisotropic media. Using the same temporal step size, our method is more accurate than the conventional RSG scheme. Our improved RSG scheme is therefore suitable for prolonged modeling of elastic-wave propagation in 2D anisotropic media.