Imaging passive seismic data

Abstract

Imaging passive seismic data is the process of synthesizing the wealth of subsurface information available from reflection seismic experiments by recording ambient sound using an array of geophones distributed at the surface. Crosscorrelating the traces of such a passive experiment can synthesize data that are identical to actively collected reflection seismic data. With a correlation-based imaging condition, wave-equation shot-profile depth migration can use raw transmission wavefields as input for producing a subsurface image. Migration is even more important for passively acquired data than for active data because with passive data, the source wavefields are likely to be weak compared with background and instrument noise — a condition that leads to a low signal-to-noise ratio. Fourier analysis of correlating long field records shows that aliasing of the wavefields from distinct shots is unavoidable. Although this reduces the order of computations for correlation by the length of the original trace, the aliasing produces an output volume that may not be substantially more useful than the raw data because of the introduction of crosstalk between multiple sources. Direct migration of raw field data still can produce an accurate image, even when the transmission wavefields from individual sources are not separated. To illustrate direct migration, I use images from a shallow passive seismic investigation targeting a buried hollow pipe and the water-table reflection. These images show a strong anomaly at the 1-m depth of the pipe and faint events that could be the water table at a depth of around [Formula: see text]. The images are not clear enough to be irrefutable. I identify deficiencies in survey design and execution to aid future efforts.