Energetic electrons inside Earths outer Van Allen belt pose a major radiation threat to space-borne electronics that often play vital roles in our modern society. Ultra-relativistic electrons with energies greater than or equal to two Megaelectron-vo
lt (MeV) are of particular interest due to their high penetrating ability, and thus forecasting these >=2 MeV electron levels has significant meaning to all space sectors. Here we update the latest development of the predictive model for MeV electrons inside the Earths outer radiation belt. The new version, called PreMevE-2E, focuses on forecasting ultra-relativistic electron flux distributions across the outer radiation belt, with no need of in-situ measurements except for at the geosynchronous (GEO) orbit. Model inputs include precipitating electrons observed in low-Earth-orbits by NOAA satellites, upstream solar wind conditions (speeds and densities) from solar wind monitors, as well as ultra-relativistic electrons measured by one Los Alamos GEO satellite. We evaluated a total of 32 supervised machine learning models that fall into four different classes of linear and neural network architectures, and also successfully tested ensemble forecasting by using groups of top-performing models. All models are individually trained, validated, and tested by in-situ electron data from NASAs Van Allen Probes mission. It is shown that the final ensemble model generally outperforms individual models overs L-shells, and this PreMevE-2E model provides reliable and high-fidelity 25-hr (~1-day) and 50-hr (~2-day) forecasts with high mean performance efficiency values. Our results also suggest this new model is dominated by non-linear components at low L-shells (< ~4) for ultra-relativistic electrons, which is different from the dominance of linear components at all L-shells for 1 MeV electrons as previously discovered.
Seismic full-waveform inversion (FWI), which uses iterative methods to estimate high-resolution subsurface models from seismograms, is a powerful imaging technique in exploration geophysics. In recent years, the computational cost of FWI has grown ex
ponentially due to the increasing size and resolution of seismic data. Moreover, it is a non-convex problem and can encounter local minima due to the limited accuracy of the initial velocity models or the absence of low frequencies in the measurements. To overcome these computational issues, we develop a multiscale data-driven FWI method based on fully convolutional networks (FCN). In preparing the training data, we first develop a real-time style transform method to create a large set of synthetic subsurface velocity models from natural images. We then develop two convolutional neural networks with encoder-decoder structure to reconstruct the low- and high-frequency components of the subsurface velocity models, separately. To validate the performance of our data-driven inversion method and the effectiveness of the synthesized training set, we compare it with conventional physics-based waveform inversion approaches using both synthetic and field data. These numerical results demonstrate that, once our model is fully trained, it can significantly reduce the computation time, and yield more accurate subsurface velocity models in comparison with conventional FWI.
Seismic full-waveform inversion (FWI) is a nonlinear computational imaging technique that can provide detailed estimates of subsurface geophysical properties. Solving the FWI problem can be challenging due to its ill-posedness and high computational
cost. In this work, we develop a new hybrid computational approach to solve FWI that combines physics-based models with data-driven methodologies. In particular, we develop a data augmentation strategy that can not only improve the representativity of the training set but also incorporate important governing physics into the training process and therefore improve the inversion accuracy. To validate the performance, we apply our method to synthetic elastic seismic waveform data generated from a subsurface geologic model built on a carbon sequestration site at Kimberlina, California. We compare our physics-consistent data-driven inversion method to both purely physics-based and purely data-driven approaches and observe that our method yields higher accuracy and greater generalization ability.
Semantic segmentation for aerial imagery is a challenging and important problem in remotely sensed imagery analysis. In recent years, with the success of deep learning, various convolutional neural network (CNN) based models have been developed. Howe
ver, due to the varying sizes of the objects and imbalanced class labels, it can be challenging to obtain accurate pixel-wise semantic segmentation results. To address those challenges, we develop a novel semantic segmentation method and call it Contextual Hourglass Network. In our method, in order to improve the robustness of the prediction, we design a new contextual hourglass module which incorporates attention mechanism on processed low-resolution featuremaps to exploit the contextual semantics. We further exploit the stacked encoder-decoder structure by connecting multiple contextual hourglass modules from end to end. This architecture can effectively extract rich multi-scale features and add more feedback loops for better learning contextual semantics through intermediate supervision. To demonstrate the efficacy of our semantic segmentation method, we test it on Potsdam and Vaihingen datasets. Through the comparisons to other baseline methods, our method yields the best results on overall performance.
Full-waveform inversion problems are usually formulated as optimization problems, where the forward-wave propagation operator $f$ maps the subsurface velocity structures to seismic signals. The existing computational methods for solving full-waveform
inversion are not only computationally expensive, but also yields low-resolution results because of the ill-posedness and cycle skipping issues of full-waveform inversion. To resolve those issues, we employ machine-learning techniques to solve the full-waveform inversion. Specifically, we focus on applying the convolutional neural network~(CNN) to directly derive the inversion operator $f^{-1}$ so that the velocity structure can be obtained without knowing the forward operator $f$. We build a convolutional neural network with an encoder-decoder structure to model the correspondence from seismic data to subsurface velocity structures. Furthermore, we employ the conditional random field~(CRF) on top of the CNN to generate structural predictions by modeling the interactions between different locations on the velocity model. Our numerical examples using synthetic seismic reflection data show that the propose CNN-CRF model significantly improve the accuracy of the velocity inversion while the computational time is reduced.
In carbon capture and sequestration, building an effective monitoring method is a crucial step to detect and respond to CO2 leakage. CO2 leakage detection methods rely on geophysical observations and monitoring sensor network. However, traditional me
thods usually require physical models to be interpreted by experts, and the accuracy of these methods will be restricted by different application conditions. In this paper, we develop a novel data-driven detection method based on densely connected convolutional networks. Our detection method learns a mapping relation between seismic data and the CO2 leakage mass. To account for the spatial and temporal characteristics of seismic data, we design a novel network architecture by combining 1-D and 2-D convolutional neural networks together. To overcome the expensive computational cost, we further apply a densely-connecting policy to our network architecture to reduce the network parameters. We employ our detection method to synthetic seismic datasets using Kimberlina model. The numerical results show that our leakage detection method accurately detects the leakage mass. Therefore, our novel CO2 leakage detection method has great potential for monitoring CO2 storage.
In carbon capture and sequestration, developing effective monitoring methods is needed to detect and respond to CO2 leakage. CO2 leakage detection methods rely on geophysical observations and monitoring sensor network. However, traditional methods us
ually require the development of site-specific physical models and expert interpretation, and the effectiveness of these methods can be limited to different application locations, operational scenarios, and conditions. In this paper, we developed a novel data-driven leakage detection method based on densely connected convolutional neural networks. Our method differs from conventional leakage monitoring methods by directly learning a mapping relationship between seismic data and the CO2 leakage mass. To account for the spatial and temporal characteristics of seismic data, our novel networks architecture combines 1D and 2D convolutional neural networks. To overcome the computational expense of solving optimization problems, we apply a densely-connecting strategy in our network architecture that reduces the number of network parameters. Based on the features generated by our convolutional neural networks, we further incorporate a long short-term memory network to utilize time-sequential information, which further improves the detection accuracy. Finally, we employ our detection method to synthetic seismic datasets generated based on flow simulations of a hypothetical CO2 storage scenario with injection into a partially compartmentalized sandstone storage reservoir. To evaluate method performance, we conducted multiple experiments including a random leakage test, a sequential test, and a robustness test. Numerical results show that our CO2 leakage detection method successfully detects the leakage and accurately predicts the leakage mass, suggesting that it has the potential for application in monitoring of real CO2 storage sites.
Acoustic- and elastic-waveform inversion is an important and widely used method to reconstruct subsurface velocity image. Waveform inversion is a typical non-linear and ill-posed inverse problem. Existing physics-driven computational methods for solv
ing waveform inversion suffer from the cycle skipping and local minima issues, and not to mention solving waveform inversion is computationally expensive. In recent years, data-driven methods become a promising way to solve the waveform inversion problem. However, most deep learning frameworks suffer from generalization and over-fitting issue. In this paper, we developed a real-time data-driven technique and we call it VelocityGAN, to accurately reconstruct subsurface velocities. Our VelocityGAN is built on a generative adversarial network (GAN) and trained end-to-end to learn a mapping function from the raw seismic waveform data to the velocity image. Different from other encoder-decoder based data-driven seismic waveform inversion approaches, our VelocityGAN learns regularization from data and further impose the regularization to the generator so that inversion accuracy is improved. We further develop a transfer learning strategy based on VelocityGAN to alleviate the generalization issue. A series of experiments are conducted on the synthetic seismic reflection data to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency, and generalization of VelocityGAN. We not only compare it with existing physics-driven approaches and data-driven frameworks but also conduct several transfer learning experiments. The experiment results show that VelocityGAN achieves state-of-the-art performance among the baselines and can improve the generalization results to some extent.
Earthquakes can be detected by matching spatial patterns or phase properties from 1-D seismic waves. Current earthquake detection methods, such as waveform correlation and template matching, have difficulty detecting anomalous earthquakes that are no
t similar to other earthquakes. In recent years, machine-learning techniques for earthquake detection have been emerging as a new active research direction. In this paper, we develop a novel earthquake detection method based on dictionary learning. Our detection method first generates rich features via signal processing and statistical methods and further employs feature selection techniques to choose features that carry the most significant information. Based on these selected features, we build a dictionary for classifying earthquake events from non-earthquake events. To evaluate the performance of our dictionary-based detection methods, we test our method on a labquake dataset from Penn State University, which contains 3,357,566 time series data points with a 400 MHz sampling rate. 1,000 earthquake events are manually labeled in total, and the length of these earthquake events varies from 74 to 7151 data points. Through comparison to other detection methods, we show that our feature selection and dictionary learning incorporated earthquake detection method achieves an 80.1% prediction accuracy and outperforms the baseline methods in earthquake detection, including Template Matching (TM) and Support Vector Machine (SVM).
Modern geosciences have to deal with large quantities and a wide variety of data, including 2-D, 3-D and 4-D seismic surveys, well logs generated by sensors, detailed lithological records, satellite images and meteorological records. These data serve
important industries, such as the exploration of mineral deposits and the production of energy (Oil and Gas, Geothermal, Wind, Hydroelectric), are important in the study of the earth crust to reduce the impact of earthquakes, in land use planning, and have a fundamental role in sustainability. The volume of raw data being stored by different earth science archives today makes it impossible to rely on manual examination by scientists. The data volumes resultant of different sources, from terrestrial or aerial to satellite surveys, will reach a terabyte per day by the time all the planned satellites are flown. In particular, the oil industry has been using large quantities of data for quite a long time. Although there are published works in this area since the 70s, these days, the ubiquity of computing and sensor devices enables the collection of higher resolution data in real time, giving a new life to a mature industrial field. Understanding and finding value in this data has an impact on the efficiency of the operations in the oil and gas production chain. Efficiency gains are particularly important since the steep fall in oil prices in 2014, and represent an important opportunity for data mining and data science.
