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In some applications, it is reasonable to assume that geodesics (rays) have a consistent orientation so that a time-harmonic elastic wave equation may be viewed as an evolution equation in one of the spatial directions. With such applications in mind, motivated by our recent work [Hadamard- Babich ansatz for point-source elastic wave equations in variable media at high frequencies, Multiscale Model Simul. 19/1 (2021) 46–86], we propose a new truncated Hadamard-Babich ansatz based globally valid asymptotic method, dubbed the fast Huygens sweeping method, for computing Green’s functions of frequency-domain point-source elastic wave equations in inhomogeneous media in the high-frequency asymptotic regime and in the presence of caustics. The first novelty of the fast Huygens sweeping method is that the Huygens-Kirchhoff secondary-source principle is used to integrate many locally valid asymptotic solutions to yield a globally valid asymptotic solution so that caustics can be treated automatically. This yields uniformly accurate solutions both near the source and away from it. The second novelty is that a butterfly algorithm is adapted to accelerate matrix-vector products induced by the Huygens-Kirchhoff integral. The new method enjoys the following desired features: (1) it treats caustics automatically; (2) precomputed asymptotic ingredients can be used to construct Green’s functions of elastic wave equations for many different point sources and for arbitrary frequencies; (3) given a specified number of points per wavelength, it constructs Green’s functions in nearly optimal complexity O(N logN) in terms of the total number of mesh points N, where the prefactor of the complexity depends only on the specified accuracy and is independent of the frequency parameter. Three-dimensional numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the performance and accuracy of the new method. 

We have developed a Liouville partial-differential-equation (PDE)-based method for computing complex-valued eikonals in real phase space in the multivalued sense in attenuating media with frequency-independent qualify factors, where the new method computes the real and imaginary parts of the complex-valued eikonal in two steps by solving Liouville equations in real phase space. Because the earth is composed of attenuating materials, seismic waves usually attenuate so that seismic data processing calls for properly treating the resulting energy losses and phase distortions of wave propagation. In the regime of high-frequency asymptotics, the complex-valued eikonal is one essential ingredient for describing wave propagation in attenuating media because this unique quantity summarizes two wave properties into one function: Its real part describes the wave kinematics and its imaginary part captures the effects of phase dispersion and amplitude attenuation. Because some popular ordinary-differential-equation (ODE)-based ray-tracing methods for computing complex-valued eikonals in real space distribute the eikonal function irregularly in real space, we are motivated to develop PDE-based Eulerian methods for computing such complex-valued eikonals in real space on regular meshes. Therefore, we solved novel paraxial Liouville PDEs in real phase space so that we can compute the real and imaginary parts of the complex-valued eikonal in the multivalued sense on regular meshes. We call the resulting method the Liouville PDE method for complex-valued multivalued eikonals in attenuating media; moreover, this new method provides a unified framework for Eulerianizing several popular approximate real-space ray-tracing methods for complex-valued eikonals, such as viscoacoustic ray tracing, real viscoelastic ray tracing, and real elastic ray tracing. In addition, we also provide Liouville PDE formulations for computing multivalued ray amplitudes in a weakly viscoacoustic medium. Numerical examples, including a synthetic gas-cloud model, demonstrate that our methods yield highly accurate complex-valued eikonals in the multivalued sense. 

First-arrival traveltime tomography is an essential method for obtaining near-surface velocity models. The adjoint-state first-arrival traveltime tomography is appealing due to its straightforward implementation, low computational cost, and low memory consumption. Because solving the point-source isotropic eikonal equation by either ray tracers or eikonal solvers intrinsically corresponds to emanating discrete rays from the source point, the resulting traveltime gradient is singular at the source point, and we denote such a singular pattern the imprint of ray-illumination. Because the adjoint-state equation propagates traveltime residuals back to the source point according to the negative traveltime gradient, the resulting adjoint state will inherit such an imprint of ray-illumination, leading to singular gradient-descent directions when updating the velocity model in the adjoint-state traveltime tomography. To mitigate this imprint, we solve the adjoint-state equation twice but with different boundary conditions: one being taken to be regular data residuals and the other taken to be ones uniformly, so that we are able to use the latter adjoint state to normalize the regular adjoint state and we further use the normalized quantity to serve as the gradient direction to update the velocity model; we call this process ray-illumination compensation. To overcome the issue of limited aperture, we have developed a spatially varying regularization method to stabilize the new gradient direction. A synthetic example demonstrates that our method is able to mitigate the imprint of ray-illumination, remove the footprint effect near source points, and provide uniform velocity updates along raypaths. A complex example extracted from the Marmousi2 model and a migration example illustrate that the new method accurately recovers the velocity model and that an offset-dependent inversion strategy can further improve the quality of recovered velocity models. 

Seismic waves in earth media usually undergo attenuation, causing energy losses and phase distortions. In the regime of high-frequency asymptotics, a complex-valued eikonal is an essential ingredient for describing wave propagation in attenuating media, where the real and imaginary parts of the eikonal function capture dispersion effects and amplitude attenuation of seismic waves, respectively. Conventionally, such a complex-valued eikonal is mainly computed either by tracing rays exactly in complex space or by tracing rays approximately in real space so that the resulting eikonal is distributed irregularly in real space. However, seismic data processing methods, such as prestack depth migration and tomography, usually require uniformly distributed complex-valued eikonals. Therefore, we have developed a unified framework to Eulerianize several popular approximate real-space ray-tracing methods for complex-valued eikonals so that the real and imaginary parts of the eikonal function satisfy the classic real-space eikonal equation and a novel real-space advection equation, respectively, and we dub the resulting method the Eulerian partial-differential-equation method. We further develop highly efficient high-order methods to solve these two equations by using the factorization idea and the Lax-Friedrichs weighted essentially nonoscillatory schemes. Numerical examples demonstrate that our method yields highly accurate complex-valued eikonals, analogous to those from ray-tracing methods. Our methods can be useful for migration and tomography in attenuating media.