3D passive wavefield imaging using the energy norm

Abstract

In passive seismic monitoring of microseismicity, full-wavefield imaging offers a robust approach for the estimation of source location and mechanism. With multicomponent data and the full 3D anisotropic elastic wave equation, the coexistence of P- and S-modes at the source location in time-reversal wavefield extrapolation allows the development of imaging conditions that identify the source position and radiation pattern. We have developed an imaging condition for passive wavefield imaging that is based on energy conservation and is related to the source mechanism. Similar to the correlation between the decomposed P- and S-wavefields — the most common imaging condition used in passive elastic wavefield imaging — our proposed imaging condition compares the different modes present in the displacement field producing a strong and focused correlation at the source location without costly wave-mode decomposition at each time step. Numerical experiments demonstrate the advantages of the proposed imaging condition (compared to PS correlation with decomposed wave modes), its sensitivity with respect to velocity inaccuracy, and its quality and efficacy in estimating the source location.