Stable Difference Approximations for the Elastic Wave Equation in Second Order Formulation

We consider the three-dimensional elastic wave equation for an isotropic heterogeneous material subject to a stress-free boundary condition. Building on our recently developed theory for difference methods for second order hyperbolic systems [H.-O. Kreiss, N. A. Petersson, J. Ystrom, SIAM J. Numer. Anal., 40 (2002), pp. 1940-1967], we develop an explicit, second order accurate technique which is stable for all ratios of longitudinal over transverse phase velocities. The spatial discretization is self-adjoint, and the stability is obtained through an energy estimate. Seismic events are often modeled using singular source terms, and we devise a technique to place sources independently of the grid while retaining second order accuracy away from the source. Several numerical examples are given.