HR: 0830h
AN: S11E-0334    [PDF]
TI: Passive Seismic Imaging
AU: * Artman, B W
EM: brad@sep.stanford.edu
AF: Stanford University, Geophysics Mitchell Bldg, Stanford, CA 94305 United States
AB: Traditionally, passive seismology connotes the use of earthquake signals from continuously recording receivers. Small time windows around the arrivals of earthquakes are then analyzed in myriad fashion. I will distinguish from this body of work, the notion of passive seismic imaging, which requires no knowledge of the time or characteristics of a source event. Instead, by using the ambient noise in the subsurface with all orders of scattering and thus randomized directionality, passive seismic imaging can produce results analogous to conventional controlled source experiments. Mathematical proof of the concept of passive seismic imaging has been presented in the literature from several foundations. The results reduce to the simple concept of cross-correlating many long recordings within a simultaneously deployed array. This generates panels with the kinematics of a shot-gather from a standard reflection seismic acquisition effort. Results from synthetic data sets show the validity of the method for point diffractor, and layered earth models. Noting the similarity of form of the standard approach to produce shot-gathers with the imaging condition of shot-profile migration, I then show that migrating the raw passive seismic data without the correlation step produces the the correct image. The synthetic data from above is used to demonstrate the technique. By comparison, this image is of better quality, and demands less compute time, than migrating the data having been cross-correlated first. Finally, both techniques are used to process a 2x2 meter, 72-channel array recorded on the beach sand of Monterey Bay, California. Approximately one meter below the sand, a six inch diameter plastic pipe was buried to serve as a target.
DE: 7260 Theory and modeling
DE: 7299 General or miscellaneous
SC: Seismology [S]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting