A B S T R A C TWe study a new curvilinear scheme for wave propagation modelling in presence of topography. The discrete scheme takes advantage of recent developments in areoacoustics. Our new scheme relies on the conventional grid coupled with optimized filters to remove numerical noise in case of strong material heterogeneity. We used non-centred stencils for free surface implementation and optimized the explicit RungeKutta scheme for the time differencing. We performed a complete theoretical stability and dispersion analysis of the discrete scheme. Finally, we illustrate the numerical accuracy of the new scheme by intensive experiments.