An improved empirical green function method to extract microseismic signals

Abstract

In mining, reservoir impoundment and hydraulic fracturing exploitation, the induced microseismic clusters may present complex waveforms at receivers since the individual events generally arrive very close. And the routine methods for arrival picking are insufficiently efficient due to these strong influences. Here, we modified the empirical green function method and applied it to extract the green functions and the radiation coefficients of microseismic events with the largest energy in clusters. Multiple-channel records were used to estimate an “average” source spectrum and then the “average” source wavelet was removed from the records by deconvolution. We applied this method to the real data, and the result indicated clear improvement in extracting the dominant event of the clusters.