Wavefront Ray-Tracing Using Unstructured Tetrahedral Meshes – An Efficient and Robust Implementation

P182 WAVEFRONT RAY-TRACING USING UNSTRUCTURED TETRAHEDRAL MESHES: AN EFFICIENT AND ROBUST IMPLEMENTATION Abstract 1 We discuss an efficient Wavefront Ray-tracing (WRT) implementation of travel time estimation using a 3D velocity model which is represented as a tetrahedral unstructured mesh. In this implementation for efficiency the wavefront is computed as a post-processing step after all the rays are traced. The wavefront and the travel time are computed analytically within each tetrahedral cell using constant linear or constant gradient velocity models. We implemented the ray tracing algorithms in C++ using Object-oriented (OO) technologies. The combination of unstructured meshing analytical solutions and OO