Efficient numerical simulation of acoustic waves under the ocean is important in different applications. Examples are accurate assessments of earthquake and tsunami risks and hazard, oil and mineral exploration, including nuclear explosion monitoring as well understanding the movement of whales in the ocean.

Waves under the ocean propagate over hundreds to thousands of kilometres interacting with complicated ocean bottom bathymetry. Typical frequencies associated with underwater acoustics are between 1 Hz and 1000 Hz. Therefore, effective numerical simulations require geometrically flexible, computational efficient and high order numerical accurate methods cable of resolving high frequencies without introducing spurious numerical wave modes.

The goal of this project is to develop and analyse numerical methods for acoustic waves using newly derived dispersion preserving upwind finite difference summation-by-parts (SBP) operators. Implement the method in WaveQLab3D. And benchmark the code against community developed benchmark problems.

Further comments: Programming in Python/MATLAB and Fortran 2003 will be required. No previous knowledge of SBP operators is required. This work will involve running simulations on a supercomputer. No prior knowledge of that is required.