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Locating and monitoring hydraulic fracture and earthquake rupture using elastic reverse-time migration

Jidong Yang

Published August 1, 2019, SCEC Contribution #9323, 2019 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #177 (PDF)

Poster Image: 
Locating and monitoring passive seismic sources provides us important information for studying hydraulic fracture and earthquake rupture. In this abstract, we present a novel passive source monitoring approach using vector-based elastic reverse-time migration (RTM). By solving the elastic wave equation using observed multicomponent records as boundary conditions, we first construct backward propagated elastic wavefields in the subsurface. Then, we separate the extrapolated wavefields into compressional (P-wave) and shear (S-wave) modes using the vector Helmholtz decomposition. A zero-lag cross-correlation imaging condition is applied to the separated pure-mode vector wavefields to produce passive source images. We implement three imaging conditions: waveform dot-product, energy and power. To capture the propagation of microseismic fracture and earthquake rupture, we modify the traditional zero-lag cross-correlation imaging condition by summing the multiplication of the separated P- and S-wavefields within local time windows. Numerical examples for synthetic data and the 2014 South Napa earthquake data demonstrate that the proposed method can provide reliable 3D constraints for hydraulic fractures and earthquake rupture.

Key Words
Hydraulic fracture, earthquake rupture

Citation
Yang, J. (2019, 08). Locating and monitoring hydraulic fracture and earthquake rupture using elastic reverse-time migration. Poster Presentation at 2019 SCEC Annual Meeting.


Related Projects & Working Groups
Fault and Rupture Mechanics (FARM)