An improved method for location of microseismic events with low signal-to-noise ratios

Abstract

An improved method is proposed in this paper for microseismic source location. The primary goal of this method is to improve the location accuracy for microseismic events with low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). In contrast to the prevalent location approach, two innovations are implemented in the proposed method. First, instead of using the hodogram, the source azimuth is estimated from a probability distribution function, and second, a new objective function is employed in grid search algorithm to find the source position. The proposed method has been tested using synthetic data examples. The results show that, for these cases, the absolute errors of the estimated source azimuth and position are less than 1° and 3m, respectively, which proves that an improvement in location accuracy can readily be achieved using the proposed method.