AxiSEM3D: efficient 3-D wave propagation across scales and worlds

AxiSEM3D is an open-source spectral-element solver for elastic and seismoacoustic wave propagation. Its central idea is to exploit the fact that seismic wavefields usually vary far more rapidly with depth than they do around a planet. Rather than discretize all three dimensions, AxiSEM3D couples a 2-D spectral-element method in the meridional (radius–depth) plane with a pseudospectral Fourier expansion in azimuth, so the cost of a simulation tracks the 3-D complexity of the wavefield rather than the size of a 3-D grid. The numerical mesh is therefore only two-dimensional (Figure 1); the third dimension, around the axis, is handled by the Fourier expansion. Conceived and principally developed by Kuangdai Leng (Leng et al. 2016, 2019), it extends the axisymmetric AxiSEM (Nissen-Meyer et al. 2007, 2008, 2014) to fully 3-D models with undulating discontinuities, and is now hosted and supported by the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics (CIG). [full article].

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