The mechanical properties of the earth's interior vary over a range of spatial scales spanning many orders of magnitude. Seismic waves provide a means of probing the earth's interior, and hopefully illuminating the important statistical character of both deep crustal structures and near surface features. I will describe an extension to an operator-based upscaling technique applied to finite difference solutions of the wave equation. The upscaling algorithm will be used to correlate earth model statistics with material properties.
This work is joint with Oksana Korostyshevskaya and Tetyana Vdovina at UMBC as well as Bill Symes, Christian Poppeliers, and Alan Levander at Rice University.