Three-Dimensional Dynamic Rupture Simulation with a High-order Discontinuous Galerkin Method on Unstructured

Abstract. Accurate and efficient numerical methods to simulate dynamic earthquake rup-ture and wave propagation in complex media and complex fault geometries are needed to ad-dress fundamental questions in earthquake dynamics, to integrate seismic and geodetic data into emerging approaches for dynamic source inversion and to generate realistic physics-based earthquake scenarios for hazard assessment. Modeling of spontaneous earthquake rupture and seismic wave propagation by a high-order discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method combined with an Arbitrarily high-order DERivatives (ADER) time integration method was introduced in 2D by de la Puente et al. [2009]. The ADER-DG method enables high accuracy in space and time and discretization by unstructured meshes. Here we extend this method to three-dimensional dynamic rupture problems. The high geometrical flexibility provided by the usage of tetrahe-dral elements and the lack of spurious mesh reflections in ADER-DG allows the refinement of the mesh close to the fault, to model the rupture dynamics adequately while concentrat-ing computational resources only where needed. Moreover, ADER-DG does not generate spu-rious high-frequency perturbations on the fault and hence does not require artificial Kelvin-Voigt damping. We verify our three-dimensional implementation by comparing results of th