No Arabic abstract
Passive microseismic data are commonly buried in noise, which presents a significant challenge for signal detection and recovery. For recordings from a surface sensor array where each trace contains a time-delayed arrival from the event, we propose an autocorrelation-based stacking method that designs a denoising filter from all the traces, as well as a multi-channel detection scheme. This approach circumvents the issue of time aligning the traces prior to stacking because every traces autocorrelation is centered at zero in the lag domain. The effect of white noise is concentrated near zero lag, so the filter design requires a predictable adjustment of the zero-lag value. Truncation of the autocorrelation is employed to smooth the impulse response of the denoising filter. In order to extend the applicability of the algorithm, we also propose a noise prewhitening scheme that addresses cases with colored noise. The simplicity and robustness of this method are validated with synthetic and real seismic traces.
Continuous microseismic monitoring of hydraulic fracturing is commonly used in many engineering, environmental, mining, and petroleum applications. Microseismic signals recorded at the surface, suffer from excessive noise that complicates first-break picking and subsequent data processing and analysis. This study presents a new first-break picking algorithm that employs concepts from seismic interferometry and time-frequency (TF) analysis. The algorithm first uses a TF plot to manually pick a reference first-break and then iterates the steps of cross-correlation, alignment, and stacking to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio of the relative first breaks. The reference first-break is subsequently used to calculate final first breaks from the relative ones. Testing on synthetic and real data sets at high levels of additive noise shows that the algorithm enhances the first-break picking considerably. Furthermore, results show that only two iterations are needed to converge to the true first breaks. Indeed, iterating more can have detrimental effects on the algorithm due to increasing correlation of random noise.
Bayesian inference applied to microseismic activity monitoring allows for principled estimation of the coordinates of microseismic events from recorded seismograms, and their associated uncertainties. However, forward modelling of these microseismic events, necessary to perform Bayesian source inversion, can be prohibitively expensive in terms of computational resources. A viable solution is to train a surrogate model based on machine learning techniques, to emulate the forward model and thus accelerate Bayesian inference. In this paper, we improve on previous work, which considered only sources with isotropic moment tensor. We train a machine learning algorithm on the power spectrum of the recorded pressure wave and show that the trained emulator allows for the complete and fast retrieval of the event coordinates for $textit{any}$ source mechanism. Moreover, we show that our approach is computationally inexpensive, as it can be run in less than 1 hour on a commercial laptop, while yielding accurate results using less than $10^4$ training seismograms. We additionally demonstrate how the trained emulators can be used to identify the source mechanism through the estimation of the Bayesian evidence. This work lays the foundations for the efficient localisation and characterisation of any recorded seismogram, thus helping to quantify human impact on seismic activity and mitigate seismic hazard.
In the presence of background noise, arrival times picked from a surface microseismic data set usually include a number of false picks that can lead to uncertainty in location estimation. To eliminate false picks and improve the accuracy of location estimates, we develop an association algorithm termed RANSAC-based Arrival Time Event Clustering (RATEC) that clusters picked arrival times into event groups based on random sampling and fitting moveout curves that approximate hyperbolas. Arrival times far from the fitted hyperbolas are classified as false picks and removed from the data set prior to location estimation. Simulations of synthetic data for a 1-D linear array show that RATEC is robust under different noise conditions and generally applicable to various types of subsurface structures. By generalizing the underlying moveout model, RATEC is extended to the case of a 2-D surface monitoring array. The effectiveness of event location for the 2-D case is demonstrated using a data set collected by the 5200-element dense Long Beach array. The obtained results suggest that RATEC is effective in removing false picks and hence can be used for phase association before location estimates.
Small magnitude earthquakes are the most abundant but the most difficult to locate robustly and well due to their low amplitudes and high frequencies usually obscured by heterogeneous noise sources. They highlight crucial information about the stress state and the spatio-temporal behavior of fault systems during the earthquake cycle, therefore, its full characterization is then crucial for improving earthquake hazard assessment. Modern DL algorithms along with the increasing computational power are exploiting the continuously growing seismological databases, allowing scientists to improve the completeness for earthquake catalogs, systematically detecting smaller magnitude earthquakes and reducing the errors introduced mainly by human intervention. In this work, we introduce OKSP, a novel automatic earthquake detection pipeline for seismic monitoring in Costa Rica. Using Kabre supercomputer from the Costa Rica High Technology Center, we applied OKSP to the day before and the first 5 days following the Puerto Armuelles, M6.5, earthquake that occurred on 26 June, 2019, along the Costa Rica-Panama border and found 1100 more earthquakes previously unidentified by the Volcanological and Seismological Observatory of Costa Rica. From these events, a total of 23 earthquakes with magnitudes below 1.0 occurred a day to hours prior to the mainshock, shedding light about the rupture initiation and earthquake interaction leading to the occurrence of this productive seismic sequence. Our observations show that for the study period, the model was 100% exhaustive and 82% precise, resulting in an F1 score of 0.90. This effort represents the very first attempt for automatically detecting earthquakes in Costa Rica using deep learning methods and demonstrates that, in the near future, earthquake monitoring routines will be carried out entirely by AI algorithms.
The operation of solid-state qubits often relies on single-shot readout using a nanoelectronic charge sensor, and the detection of events in a noisy sensor signal is crucial for high fidelity readout of such qubits. The most common detection scheme, comparing the signal to a threshold value, is accurate at low noise levels but is not robust to low-frequency noise and signal drift. We describe an alternative method for identifying charge sensor events using wavelet edge detection. The technique is convenient to use and we show that, with realistic signals and a single tunable parameter, wavelet detection can outperform thresholding and is significantly more tolerant to 1/f and low-frequency noise.