Instantaneous phase variation for seismic velocity monitoring from ambient noise at the exploration scale

Abstract

Recent studies in geophysics have investigated the use of seismic-noise correlations to measure weak-velocity variations from seismic-noise recordings. However, classically, the existing algorithms used to monitor medium velocities need extensive efforts in terms of computation time. This implies that these techniques are not appropriate at smaller scales in an exploration context when continuous data sets on dense arrays of sensors have to be analyzed. We applied a faster technique that allows the monitoring of small velocity changes from the instantaneous phase measurement of the seismic-noise crosscorrelation functions. We performed comparisons with existing algorithms using synthetic signals. The results we have obtained for a real data set show that the statistical distribution of the velocity-change estimates provides reliable measurements, despite the low signal-to-noise ratio obtained from the noise-correlation process.