Automatic detection of low-magnitude earthquakes has become an increasingly important research topic in recent years due to a sharp increase in induced seismicity around the globe. The detection of low-magnitude seismic events is essential for microseismic monitoring of hydraulic fracturing, carbon capture and storage, and geothermal operations for hazard detection and mitigation. Moreover, the detection of micro-earthquakes is crucial to understanding the underlying mechanisms of larger earthquakes. Various algorithms, including deep learning methods, have been proposed over the years to detect such low-magnitude events. However, there is still a need for improving the robustness of these methods in discriminating between local sources of noise and weak seismic events. In this study, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect seismic events from shallow borehole stations in Groningen, the Netherlands. We train a CNN model to detect low-magnitude earthquakes, harnessing the multi-level sensor configuration of the G-network in Groningen. Each G-network station consists of four geophones at depths of 50, 100, 150, and 200 m. Unlike prior deep learning approaches that use 3-component seismic records only at a single sensor level, we use records from the entire borehole as one training example. This allows us to train the CNN model using moveout patterns of the energy traveling across the borehole sensors to discriminate between events originating in the subsurface and local noise arriving from the surface. We compare the prediction accuracy of our trained CNN model to that of the STA/LTA and template matching algorithms on a two-month continuous record. We demonstrate that the CNN model shows significantly better performance than STA/LTA and template matching in detecting new events missing from the catalog and minimizing false detections. Moreover, we find that using the moveout feature allows us to effectively train our CNN model using only a fraction of the data that would be needed otherwise, saving plenty of manual labor in preparing training labels. The proposed approach can be easily applied to other microseismic monitoring networks with multi-level sensors.

In this work, an efficient numerical scheme is presented for seismic blind deconvolution in a multichannel scenario. The proposed method iterate with two steps: first, wavelet estimation across all channels and second, refinement of the reflectivity estimate simultaneously in all channels using sparse deconvolution. The reflectivity update step is formulated as a basis pursuit denoising problem and a sparse solution is obtained with the spectral projected-gradient algorithm -faithfulness to the recorded traces is constrained by the measured noise level. Wavelet re-estimation has a closed form solution when performed in the frequency domain by finding the minimum energy wavelet common to all channels. Nothing is assumed known about the wavelet apart from its time duration. In tests with both synthetic and real data, the method yields sparse reflectivity series and stable wavelet estimates results compared to existing methods with significantly less computational effort.

We introduce a new method for first-arrival picking based on digital color-image segmentation of energy ratios of refracted seismic data. The method uses a new color-image segmentation scheme based on projection onto convex sets (POCS). The POCS requires a reference color for the first break and one iteration to segment the first-break amplitudes from other arrivals. We tested the segmentation method on synthetic seismic data sets with various amounts of additive Gaussian noise. The proposed method gives similar performance to a modified version of Coppens’ method for traces with high signal-to-noise ratio and medium-to-large offsets. Finally, we applied our method and used as well the modified first-arrival picking method based on Coppens’ method to pick the first arrivals on four real data sets, where both were compared to the first breaks that were picked manually and then interpolated. Based on an assessment error of a 20-ms window with respect to manual picks that are interpolated, we find that our method gives comparable performance to Coppens’ method, depending on the data difficulty of picking first arrivals. Therefore, we believe that our proposed method is a good new addition to the existing methods of first-arrival picking.

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