Microseismic monitoring is a practical technique for mapping hydraulic fractures. Accurate imaging of the event location is critical for fracture interpretation. Microseismic data, however, often present weak P-waves or no P-waves at all because of low signal-to-noise ratio. S-waves, on the other hand, are relatively large, and reliably observed. Therefore, it will be significantly meaningful if we can use only S-phase to determine the source location. We design two synthetic experiments to understand the possibility of using only S-phase to locate the microseismic events. In the first experiment we use only S-wave traveltime information to locate events, while in the second experiment we utilize S-wave traveltime along with incident angle to enhance accuracy. The experiment results suggest that using only S-wave traveltime information is not feasible to locate the microseismic events. But using S-wave traveltime and incident angle can produce an acceptable solution if the source-receiver distance is comparable with the acquisition aperture.
展开▼
