We present a new numerical method for elastic wave modeling in 3D isotropic and anisotropic media, which is called the 3D optimal nearly analytic discrete method (ONADM) in this article. This work is an extension of the 2D ONADM (Yang et al., 2004) that models acoustic and elastic waves propagating in 2D media. The formulation is derived by using a multivariable truncated Taylor series expansion and high-order interpolation approximations. Our 3D ONADM enables wave propagation to be simulated in three dimensions through isotropic and anisotropic models. Promising numerical results show that the error of the ONADM for the 3D case is less than those of the conventional finite-difference (FD) method and the so-called Lax-Wendroff correction (LWC) schemes, measured quantitatively by the rootmean-square deviation from analytical solution. The seismic wave fields in the 3D isotropic and anisotropic media are simulated and compared with those obtained by using the fourth-order LWC method and exact solutions for the acoustic wave case. We show that, compared with the conventional FD method and the LWC schemes, the ONADM for the 3D case can reduce significantly the storage space and computational costs. Numerical experiments illustrate that the ONADM provides a useful tool for the 3D large-scale isotropic and anisotropic problems and it can suppress effectively numerical dispersions caused by discretizing the 3D wave equations when too-coarse grids are used, which is the same as the 2D ONADM. Numerical modeling also implies that simultaneously using both the wave displacement and its gradients to approximate the high-order derivatives is important for both decreasing the numerical dispersion caused by the discretization of wave equations and compensating the important wave-field information included in wave-displacement gradients.

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Numerical dispersion limits the application of numerical simulation methods for solving the acoustic wave equation in large-scale computation. The nearly analytic discrete method (NADM) and its improved version for suppressing numerical dispersion were developed recently. This new method is a refinement of two previous methods and further increases the ability of suppressing numerical dispersion for modeling acoustic wave propagation in 2D heterogeneous media, which uses acoustic wave displacement, particle velocity, and their gradients to restructure the acoustic wavefield via the truncated Taylor expansion and the high-order interpolation approximate method. For the method proposed, we investigate its implementation and compare it with the higher-order Lax-Wendroff correction (LWC) scheme, the original nearly analytic discrete method (NADM) and its im-proved version with regard to numerical dispersion, computational costs, and computer storage requirements. The numerical dispersion relations provided by the refined algorithm for 1D and 2D cases are analyzed, as well as the numerical results obtained by this method against the exact solution for the 2D acoustic case. Numerical results show that the refined method gives no visible numerical dispersion for very large spatial grid increments. It can simulate high-frequency wave propagation for a given grid interval and automatically suppress the numerical dispersion when the acoustic wave equation is discretized, when too few samples per wavelength are used, or when models have large velocity contrasts. Unlike the high-order LWC methods, our present method can save substantial computational costs and memory requirements because very large grid increments can be used. The refined method can be used for the simulation of large-scale wavefields.