This paper addresses the extension of the Bayliss᎐Turkel second-order radiation condition to an arbitrarily shaped surface. The derivation is based mainly on the pseudo-differential calculus as well as on the introduction of a criterion providing a precise handling of the approximation process involved in the derivation of the radiation condition. The radiation condition then ranges among the most accurate of those of order two. As a by-product of the derivation, almost all known radiation conditions of order less than or equal to two are recovered and their respective accuracies are compared. ᮊ 1999 Academic Press

Context. Local helioseismology has so far relied on semi-analytical methods to compute the spatial sensitivity of wave travel times to perturbations in the solar interior. These methods are cumbersome and lack flexibility. Aims. Here we propose a convenient framework for numerically solving the forward problem of time-distance helioseismology in the frequency domain. The fundamental quantity to be computed is the cross-covariance of the seismic wavefield. Methods. We choose sources of wave excitation that enable us to relate the cross-covariance of the oscillations to the Green's function in a straightforward manner. We illustrate the method by considering the 3D acoustic wave equation in an axisymmetric reference solar model, ignoring the effects of gravity on the waves. The symmetry of the background model around the rotation axis implies that the Green's function can be written as a sum of longitudinal Fourier modes, leading to a set of independent 2D problems. We use a high-order finite-element method to solve the 2D wave equation in frequency space. The computation is 'embarrassingly parallel', with each frequency and each azimuthal order solved independently on a computer cluster. Results. We compute travel-time sensitivity kernels in spherical geometry for flows, sound speed, and density perturbations under the first Born approximation. Convergence tests show that travel times can be computed with a numerical precision better than one millisecond, as required by the most precise travel-time measurements. Conclusions. The method presented here is computationally efficient and will be used to interpret travel-time measurements in order to infer, e.g., the large-scale meridional flow in the solar convection zone. It allows the implementation of (full-waveform) iterative inversions, whereby the axisymmetric background model is updated at each iteration.

The numerical simulation of time-harmonic waves in heterogeneous media is a tricky task which consists in reproducing oscillations. These oscillations become stronger as the frequency increases, and high-order finite element methods have demonstrated their capability to reproduce the oscillatory behavior. However, they keep coping with limitations in capturing fine scale heterogeneities. We propose a new approach which can be applied in highly heterogeneous propagation media. It consists in constructing an approximate medium in which we can perform computations for a large variety of frequencies. The construction of the approximate medium can be understood as applying a quadrature formula locally. We establish estimates which generalize existing estimates formerly obtained for homogeneous Helmholtz problems. We then provide numerical results which illustrate the good level of accuracy of our solution methodology.

Abstract. This work offers some contributions to the numerical study of acoustic waves propagating in the Sun and its atmosphere. The main goal is to provide boundary conditions for outgoing waves in the solar atmosphere where it is assumed that the sound speed is constant and the density decays exponentially with radius. Outgoing waves are governed by a Dirichlet-to-Neumann map which is obtained from the factorization of the Helmholtz equation expressed in spherical coordinates. For the purpose of extending the outgoing wave equation to axisymmetric or 3D cases, different approximations are implemented by using the frequency and/or the angle of incidence as parameters of interest. This results in boundary conditions called Atmospheric Radiation Boundary Conditions (ARBC) which are tested in ideal and realistic configurations. These ARBCs deliver accurate results and reduce the computational burden by a factor of two in helioseismology applications.Résumé. Ce travail apporte quelques contributions à l'étude numérique des ondes acoustiques se propageant dans le Soleil et son atmosphère. Il se base sur la caractérisa-tion des ondes sortantes dans l'atmosphère représentée par une vitesse constante et une densité décroissant exponentiellement. Les ondes sortantes sont régies par un opérateur Dirichlet-to-Neumann qui est obtenu par la factorisation de l'équation de Helmholtz formulée dans les coordonnées sphériques. Afin d'étendre l'équation des ondes sortantes à des géométries axisymétriques ou 3D, différentes approximations sont menées en utilisant la fréquence et/ou l'angle d'incidence comme paramètres d'intérêt. Ceci mène à des conditions de frontière que nous appelons Conditions de Radiation Atmosphériques (ARBC) et qui sont testées en configuration idéalisées et réalistes. Ces conditions ARBC offrent des résultats précis et réduisent le coût de calcul d'un facteur deux pour le cas du Soleil.1991 Mathematics Subject Classification. 00A71, 35L05, 85A20, 33C55, 65M60.December 1, 2017.

New approximate local DtN boundary conditions are proposed to be applied on elliptical-or prolate-spheroid exterior boundaries when solving respectively twoor three-dimensional acoustic scattering problems by elongated obstacles. These new absorbing conditions are designed to be exact for the first modes. They can be easily incorporated in any finite element parallel code while preserving the local structure of the algebraic system. Unlike the standard approximate local DtN boundary conditions that are restricted to circular-or spherical-shaped boundaries, the proposed conditions are applicable to exterior elliptical-shaped boundaries that are more suitable for surrounding elongated scatterers because they yield to smaller computational domains. The mathematical and numerical analysis of the effect of the frequency and the eccentricity values of the boundary on the accuracy of these conditions, when applied for solving radiating and scattering problems, revealsin particular-that the new second-order DtN boundary condition retains a good level of accuracy, in the low frequency regime, regardless of the slenderness of the boundary.

The temporal covariance between seismic waves measured at two locations on the solar surface is the fundamental observable in time-distance helioseismology. Above the acoustic cut-off frequency (∼5.3 mHz), waves are not trapped in the solar interior and the covariance function can be used to probe the upper atmosphere. We wish to implement appropriate radiative boundary conditions for computing the propagation of high-frequency waves in the solar atmosphere. We consider the radiative boundary conditions recently developed by Barucq et al. (2017) for atmospheres in which sound-speed is constant and density decreases exponentially with radius. We compute the cross-covariance function using a finite element method in spherical geometry and in the frequency domain. The ratio between first-and second-skip amplitudes in the time-distance diagram is used as a diagnostic to compare boundary conditions and to compare with observations. We find that a boundary condition applied 500 km above the photosphere and derived under the approximation of small angles of incidence accurately reproduces the 'infinite atmosphere' solution for high-frequency waves. When the radiative boundary condition is applied 2 Mm above the photosphere, we find that the choice of atmospheric model affects the time-distance diagram. In particular, the time-distance diagram exhibits double-ridge structure when using a VAL atmospheric model.

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In this paper, we provide an a priori optimizability analysis of nonlinear least squares problems that are solved by local optimization algorithms. We define attraction (convergence) basins where the misfit functional is guaranteed to have only one local -and hence global -stationary point, provided the data error is below some tolerable error level. We use geometry in the data space (strictly quasiconvex sets) in order to compute the size of the attraction basin (in the parameter space) and the associated tolerable error level (in the data space). These estimates are defined a priori, i.e., they do not involve any least squares minimization problem, and only depend on the forward map. The methodology is applied to the comparison of the optimizability properties of two methods for the seismic inverse problem for a timeharmonic wave equation: the Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) and its Migration Based Travel Time (MBTT) reformulation. Computation of the size of attraction basins for the two approaches allows to quantify the benefits of the latter, which can alleviate the requirement of low-frequency data for the reconstruction of the background velocity model.