Abstract
Results are presented for real-time seismic imaging of subsurface fluid flow by parsimonious refraction and surface-wave interferometry. Each subsurface velocity image inverted from time-lapse seismic data only requires several minutes of recording time, which is less than the time-scale of the fluid-induced changes in the rock properties. In this sense this is real-time imaging. The images are P-velocity tomograms inverted from the first-arrival times and the S-velocity tomograms inverted from dispersion curves. Compared to conventional seismic imaging, parsimonious interferometry reduces the recording time and increases the temporal resolution of time-lapse seismic images by more than an order-of-magnitude. In our seismic experiment, we recorded 90 sparse data sets over 4.5 h while injecting 12-tons of water into a sand dune. Results show that the percolation of water is mostly along layered boundaries down to a depth of a few meters, which is consistent with our 3D computational fluid flow simulations and laboratory experiments. The significance of parsimonious interferometry is that it provides more than an order-of-magnitude increase of temporal resolution in time-lapse seismic imaging. We believe that real-time seismic imaging will have important applications for non-destructive characterization in environmental, biomedical, and subsurface imaging.
Highlights
Results are presented for real-time seismic imaging of subsurface fluid flow by parsimonious refraction and surface-wave interferometry
The time-lapse parsimonious interferometry method is tested on seismic data recorded over a sand dune (Fig. 2) near the KAUST campus where 12 tons of water were injected over a 4.5-h period
We invert for the P-wave and S-wave velocity models from each of the time-lapse data sets to monitor the changes in the subsurface velocity
Summary
Results are presented for real-time seismic imaging of subsurface fluid flow by parsimonious refraction and surface-wave interferometry. We assume that the seismic images are extracted from raw seismic data by a tomographic technique such as traveltime tomography or surface-wave inversion[6] This means that the typical temporal resolution of time-lapse imaging is limited to an hour or more. Be inverted by refraction tomography to produce tomographic snap-shots of the subsurface velocity model every few minutes This enormous increase in the number of traveltime picks and associated rays, compared to the many fewer traveltimes from the two reciprocal and several infill shot gathers, provides for increased model resolution and a rapid delineation of the fluid-flow properties[10] in the subsurface. Parsimonious interferometry can be used for rapidly reconstructing the S-velocity model from recorded surface waves, as demonstrated by[11]
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