Modeling and Processing of Continuous 3D Elastic Wavefield Data

Continuous seismic wavefields are excited by earthquake clustering, induced seismicity in reservoirs, and mining. In hydrocarbon reservoirs, for example, pore pressure changes and fluid flow (mass transfer) will cause incremental deviatoric stresses sufficient to trigger and sustain seismic activity. Here we address three aspects of seismic wavefields in three-dimensional heterogeneous media triggered by distributed sources in space and time: forward modeling, multichannel data processing, and source location imaging. A power law distribution of seismic sources (such as the Gutenberg-Richter law) is used for the modeling of viscoelastic/elastic wave propagation through a realistic earth model. 3D modeling provides new insight in the interaction of multi-source wavefields and the role of scale-dependend elastic model parameters on transmitted and reflected/back-scattered wavefields. There exists a strong correlation between the spatial properties of the compressional, shear wave and density perturbations and the lateral correlation length of the resulting reflected or transmitted seismic wavefields. Modeling is based on the implementation of 3D elastic/viscoelastic FD codes on massive parallel and/or distributed computing resources using MPI (message passing interface). For parallelization, large grid 3D earth models are decomposed into subvolume processing elements whereby each processing element is updating the wavefield within its portion of the grid. Processing of continuous seismic wavefields excited by multiple distributed sources is based on a combination of crosscorrelated or slowness-transformed array data and Kirchhoff or reverse time migration for source location or source volume imaging. The appearance of slowness in both migration and array data processing suggests the possibility of combining them into a single process. In order to place further constraints on the migration, the directivity properties of 3-component receiver arrays can be included in the processing sequence. Continuous seismic array data from both borehole and surface seismic acquisition geometries are suitable for the proposed detection and mapping sequence for acoustic emission data in space and time.