3D Traveltime Tomography and 1D Wavefield Inversion of Dense 3D Seismic Refraction Data From a Shallow Groundwater Contamination Site
Abstract
In 2012 Rice University carried out a shallow seismic survey in Rifle, Colorado where the groundwater was contaminated by vanadium and uranium ore-processing operations ending in 1958. The purpose of the seismic survey is to provide constraints to improve hydrogeologic modeling. The 3-D P-wave survey over 96 m x 60 m included 2158 shots recorded by 384 channels yielding 828,672 traces. An accelerated weight drop provided data with good signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and a dominant frequency of 60 Hz. The overall good SNR allows for precise picking and an average uncertainty of 0.65 ms was assigned based on an analysis of all reciprocal time differences. Unreliable source triggering necessitated solving for shot time corrections during travelitme tomography, creating a mixed-parameter inverse problem. Several steps in addition to conventional 3-D traveltime tomography were applied to exploit the dense data and precise picking to overcome the data's low frequency content: (1) stacking the arrival-time-corrected traces in offset bins for 1-D reflectivity modeling to constrain discontinuities; (2) reduced smoothing regularization based on the local angular distribution of raypaths; and (3) a frequency-dependent form of traveltime tomography to account for the data's frequency content. Model assessment techniques include: (1) removal of the best and poorest fit data to assess the effect of outliers, (2) a jackknife procedure to estimate the uncertainty of each velocity node, and (3) checkerboard tests to estimate lateral model resolution using random shot and picking errors consistent with the real data. The results show that most of the velocity model has a relative error of less than 2% and lateral resolution of better than 5, 10 and 20 m to depths of 5, 10 and 20 m, respectively. Results include an isovelocity surface that represents the top of the Wasatch formation.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFMNS31A1943Z
- Keywords:
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- 0994 Instruments and techniques;
- EXPLORATION GEOPHYSICSDE: 0999 General or miscellaneous;
- EXPLORATION GEOPHYSICSDE: 1835 Hydrogeophysics;
- HYDROLOGY