On-the-Fly Full Hessian Kernel Calculations Based upon Seismic-Wave Simulations

Full waveform inversion or adjoint tomography has routinely been performed to image the internal structure of the Earth at high resolution. This is typically done using the Fréchet kernels and the approximate Hessian or the approximate inverse Hessian because of the high-computational cost of computing and storing the full Hessian. Alternatively, the full Hessian kernels can be used to improve inversion resolutions and convergence rates, as well as possibly to mitigate interparameter trade-offs. The storage requirements of the full Hessian kernel calculations can be reduced by compression methods, but often at a price of accuracy depending on the compression factor. Here, we present open-source codes to compute both Fréchet and full Hessian kernels on the fly in the computer random access memory (RAM) through simultaneously solving four wave equations, which we call Quad Spectral-Element Method (QuadSEM). By recomputing two forward fields at the same time that two adjoint fields are calculated during the adjoint simulation, QuadSEM constructs the full Hessian kernels using the exact forward and adjoint fields. In addition, we also implement an alternative approach based on the classical wavefield storage method (WSM), which stores forward wavefields every kth (k≥1) timestep during the forward simulation and reads required fields back into memory during the adjoint simulation for kernel construction. Both Fréchet and full Hessian kernels can be computed simultaneously through the QuadSEM or the WSM code, only doubling the computational cost compared with the computation of Fréchet kernels alone. Compared with WSM, QuadSEM can reduce the disk space and input/output cost by three orders of magnitude in the presented examples that use 15,000 timesteps. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the functionality of the methods, and the computer codes are provided with this contribution.