A seismic ray tracing method based on Fibonacci search

Abstract

We design a fast ray tracing technique to simulate the response of seismic sources located at depth such as passive data due to fluid injection, hydraulic fracturing, volcanic tremors or earthquakes, with receivers located at the surface recording the displacement (and particle-velocity) field. The ray tracing is based on the Fibonacci search algorithm. We consider interfaces of arbitrary geometry and homogeneous layers defined by the seismic velocity, the quality factor and the mass density. Amplitude losses consider geometricalspreading, intrinsic attenuation (related to the quality factor) and transmission losses at the interfaces. The traces corresponding to time spikes are then convolved with a Ricker wavelet to obtain band-limited synthetic seismograms. We compare the results with full-wave seismograms computed with a direct algorithm based on the Fourier pseudospectral method. The ray tracing algorithm is much faster and from a practical point of view can be used as aforward modeling algorithm for the location of different sources of seismic energy.