A parallel 3-D staggered grid pseudospectral time domain method for ground-penetrating radar wave simulation

We presented a parallel 3-D staggered grid pseudospectral time domain (PSTD) method for simulating ground-penetrating radar (GPR) wave propagation. We took the staggered grid method to weaken the global effect in PSTD and developed a modified fast Fourier transform (FFT) spatial derivative operator to eliminate the wraparound effect due to the implicit periodical boundary condition in FFT operator. After the above improvements, we achieved the parallel PSTD computation based on an overlap domain decomposition method without any absorbing condition for each subdomain, which can significantly reduce the required grids in each overlap subdomain comparing with other proposed algorithms. We test our parallel technique for some numerical models and obtained consistent results with the analytical ones and/or those of the nonparallel PSTD method. The above numerical tests showed that our parallel PSTD algorithm is effective in simulating 3-D GPR wave propagation, with merits of saving computation time, as well as more flexibility in dealing with complicated models without losing the accuracy. The application of our parallel PSTD method in applied geophysics and paleoseismology based on GPR data confirmed the efficiency of our algorithm and its potential applications in various subdisciplines of solid earth geophysics. This study would also provide a useful parallel PSTD approach to the simulation of other geophysical problems on distributed memory PC cluster.