A short-memory operator splitting scheme for constant-Q viscoelastic wave equation

Abstract: We propose a short-memory operator splitting scheme for solving the constant-Q wave equation, where the fractional stress-strain relation contains multiple Caputo fractional derivatives with order much smaller than 1. The key is to exploit its extension problem by converting the flat singular kernels into strongly localized ones, so that the major contribution of weakly singular integrals over a semi-infinite interval can be captured by a few Laguerre functions with proper asymptotic behavior. Despite its success in reducing both memory requirement and arithmetic complexity, we show that numerical accuracy under prescribed memory variables may deteriorate in time due to the dynamical increments of projection errors. Fortunately, it can be considerably alleviated by introducing a suitable scaling factor $\beta > 1$ and pushing the collocation points closer to origin. An operator splitting scheme is introduced to solve the resulting set of equations, where the auxiliary dynamics can be solved exactly, so that it gets rid of the numerical stiffness and discretization errors. Numerical experiments on both 1-D diffusive wave equation and 2-D constant-Q $P$- and $S$-wave equations are presented to validate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed scheme.