Application of the nearly perfectly matched layer for seismic wave propagation in 2D homogeneous isotropic media

Numerical modelling plays an important role in helping us understand the characteristics of seismic wave propagation. The presence of spurious reflections from the boundaries of the truncated computational domain is a prominent problem in finite difference computations. The nearly perfectly matched layer has been proven to be a very effective boundary condition to absorb outgoing waves in both electromagnetic and acoustic media. In this paper, the nearly perfectly matched layer technique is applied to elastic isotropic media to further test the method's absorbing ability. The staggered‐grid finite‐difference method (fourth‐order accuracy in space and second‐order accuracy in time) is used in the numerical simulation of seismic wave propagation in 2D Cartesian coordinates. In the numerical tests, numerical comparisons between the nearly perfectly matched layer and the convolutional perfectly matched layer, which is considered the best absorbing layer boundary condition, is also provided. Three numerical experiments demonstrate that the nearly perfectly matched layer has a similar performance to the convolutional perfectly matched layer and can be a valuable alternative to other absorbing layer boundary conditions.