In this paper,a new earthquake location method based on the waveform inversion is proposed.As is known to all,the waveform misfit function under the L2 measure is suffering from the cycle skipping problem.This leads to a very small convergence domain of the conventional waveform based earthquake location methods.In present study,by introducing and solving two simple sub-optimization problems,we greatly expand the convergence domain of the waveform based earthquake location method.According to a large number of numerical experiments,the new method expands the range of convergence by several tens of times.This allows us to locate the earthquake accurately even from some relatively bad initial values.
We propose a symplectic partitioned Runge-Kutta （SPRK） method with eighth-order spatial accuracy based on the extended Hamiltonian system of the acoustic waveequation. Known as the eighth-order NSPRK method, this technique uses an eighth-orderaccurate nearly analytic discrete （NAD） operator to discretize high-order spatial differentialoperators and employs a second-order SPRK method to discretize temporal derivatives.The stability criteria and numerical dispersion relations of the eighth-order NSPRK methodare given by a semi-analytical method and are tested by numerical experiments. We alsoshow the differences of the numerical dispersions between the eighth-order NSPRK methodand conventional numerical methods such as the fourth-order NSPRK method, the eighth-order Lax-Wendroff correction （LWC） method and the eighth-order staggered-grid （SG）method. The result shows that the ability of the eighth-order NSPRK method to suppress thenumerical dispersion is obviously superior to that of the conventional numerical methods. Inthe same computational environment, to eliminate visible numerical dispersions, the eighth-order NSPRK is approximately 2.5 times faster than the fourth-order NSPRK and 3.4 timesfaster than the fourth-order SPRK, and the memory requirement is only approximately47.17% of the fourth-order NSPRK method and 49.41% of the fourth-order SPRK method,which indicates the highest computational efficiency. Modeling examples for the two-layermodels such as the heterogeneous and Marmousi models show that the wavefields generatedby the eighth-order NSPRK method are very clear with no visible numerical dispersion.These numerical experiments illustrate that the eighth-order NSPRK method can effectivelysuppress numerical dispersion when coarse grids are adopted. Therefore, this methodcan greatly decrease computer memory requirement and accelerate the forward modelingproductivity. In general, the eighth-order NSPRK method has tremendous potential value forseismic exploration and seismology research.
