Simulation study on seismic monitoring of aquifers

Abstract

This study focuses on developing computational tools to estimate groundwater volume from seismic measurements. The poroelastic signature from an aquifer is simulated and methods to use this signature to estimate porous properties of the permeable rock and the level of the water table are investigated. In this work, the spectral-element method (SEM) is used for solving the forward model that characterizes propagation of seismic waves. The SEM combines the accuracy of the global pseudospectral method with the flexibility of the classical finite element method. The SPECFEM-2D software is used for calculating seismic wave fields (forward + adjoint) in elastic and poroelastic media. The inverse problem is solved in the Bayesian framework, which makes efficient use of a priori information related to modeling and measurement uncertainties of the problem. It this study, preliminary results in the two-dimensional case with simulated data are presented.