Publications

The Effects of Stochastic Velocity Variations on Estimating Time Dependent Seismic Moment Tensors: Applications to the Blue Mountain Well Perforation Data

Poppeliers, Christian P.; Preston, Leiph A.

Resolving the time dependent terms in the seismic moment tensor provides important informa- tion that can be used to interpret the source process of an explosion, including the separation of isotropic explosion terms from shear forces and potentially isolated force couples. In this report, we detail our method of inverting three component seismic data for the seismic moment tensor. We review possible seismic source models from the simplest isotropic explosion type source to those incorporating the six independent moment tensor terms. The inversion we describe is formulated in the frequency domain, and results in estimates of time dependent moment tensor components. The inversion relies on an accurate estimate of the Green's functions of the Earth. However, given the complexity of the Earth, we explore the effects of inaccuracies in the presumed Earth model used to estimate the Green's functions needed for the inversion. Specifically, we explore the effects of stochastic variations in the Earth models on the inversion results. These tests are syn- thetic throughout, and show that adding stochastic density/velocity heterogeneity in the presumed Earth model results in reduced amplitude seismic moment tensor estimates, as well as degrading the data misfit. We suggest two mitigation strategies. First, produce a suite of Green's functions using different realizations of the stochastic field within the Earth Model. Secondly, perform the in- version in the power spectral domain, eliminating all phase information. Finally, we analyze actual seismic data collected in winter 2017/2018. The seismic data was collected at in active geothermal well site outside of Winnimucca, NV, and was produced during well stimulation operations. In general, the inversion results were poor, with a high degree of data misfit. We hypothesize that the poor results are a function of a poorly constrained Earth model as well as noisy, high-frequency data being used in the inversion.