A debiasing approach to microseismic

Microseismic data is often used to locate fracture locations and their origin in time created by fracking. Although surface microseismic data can have large apertures and is easier to acquire than the borehole data, it often suffers from poor signal to noise ratio (S/R). Poor S/R poses a challenge in terms of estimating the correct location and source-time function of a microseismic source. In this work, we propose a denoising step in combination with a computationally cheap debiasing based approach to locate microseismic sources and to estimate their source-time functions with correct amplitude from extremely noisy data. Through numerical experiments, we demonstrate that our method can work with closely spaced microseismic sources with source-time functions of different peak amplitudes and frequencies. We have also shown the ability of our method with the smooth velocity model.

https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Conferences/SEG/2018/sharan2...