Sparsity-promoting joint microseismic source collocation and source-time function estimation

In this work, we propose a new method to simultaneously locate microseismic events (e.g., induced by hydraulic fracturing) and estimate the source signature of these events. We use the method of linearized Bregman. This algorithm focuses unknown sources at their true locations by promoting sparsity along space and at the same time keeping the energy along time in check. We are particularly interested in situations where the microseismic data is noisy, sources have different signatures and we only have access to the smooth background-velocity model. We perform numerical experiments to demonstrate the usability of the proposed method. We also compare our results with full-waveform inversion based microseismic event collocation methods. Our method gives flexibility to simultaneously get a more accurate source image along with an estimate of the source-time function, which carries important information on the rupturing process and source mechanism.

https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Conferences/SEG/2016/sharan2...