Written on: 2012-04-02

Finite Difference and Seismic Wave Propagation

At one point in my career, I acted as a liaison between some geophysicists and a team of programmers writing software for those geophysicists to use. The software used a finite difference method to approximate the solution to partial differential equations in order to model seismic wave propagations. Here are some slides that I wrote — in theory, these were to help me explain this to other programmers, but really I wrote them to make sure that I understood it all myself:

The slides on seismic wave modelling are cut short, as the methods we used for modelling anisotropic velocities were trade secrets at the time so I could not publish them here.