Meshes

The mesher use by AxiSEM3D is called Salvus Mesh Lite. See the Installation Instructions and Meshing documentation for more information.

In general, you have a choice between Cartesian (box-shaped) meshes, and D-shaped (semi-circular) meshes. These obviously solve for the same physics; and you can actually adapt the Cartesian simulation to account for the curvature of the Earth’s surface (to move from local to regional scales) or reduce the D-shaped mesh to a wedge-shaped mesh (to move from global to regional scales).

It is worth bearing in mind that unless you use a full D-shaped (i.e., 180°/full semi-circle) mesh, you need to think about the ‘false’ boundaries that you impose at the edges of your box or wedge. There is more on this in the mesher description in, but in short you can use an absorbing or reflecting boundary. In the former case you have a few options depending on what you need, the latter is far simpler and somewhat cheaper but will also contaminate your seismograms with reflections from the edge of the box if you let the simulation run on for too long.