In this work, we have worked on possibilities to model artificial boundaries needed in the simulation of wave propagation in acoustic heterogeneous media. Our motivation is to restrict the computational domain in the simulation of seismic waves that are propagated from the earth and transmitted to the stratified heterogeneous media composed by ocean and atmosphere. Two possibilities were studied and compared in computational tests: the use of absorbing boundary conditions on an artificial boundary in the atmosphere layer and the elimination of the atmosphere layer using an equivalent boundary condition that mimics the propagation of waves through the atmosphere.