A significant number of microseismic events were detected over 120 days of passive monitoring with a deepwater PRM pilot array offshore Brazil. The array is installed in 1240-1310m water depth and consists of over 700 four-component stations. Recording occurred during two consecutive two-month periods in between active seismic surveys. The passive monitoring detected distinct event swarms that are highly clustered in space and time. These events occur at an estimated depth of about 5 km with moment magnitudes ranging from 0.2 to 1.9. The seismicity occurs in a depth interval near a currently undeveloped deeper reservoir and is possibly of natural origin. The capture of such seismicity is valuable input for longterm risk assessment and development planning of the lower reservoir.
In this study, elastic-wavefield interferometry was used to recover P- and S-waves from the 3D P-wave vibrator VSP data at Wamsutter field in Wyoming. S-wave velocity and birefringence is of particular interest for the geophysical objectives of lithology discrimination and fracture characterization in naturally fractured tight gas sand reservoirs. Because we rely on deconvolution interferometry for retrieving interreceiver P- and S-waves in the subsurface, the output fields are suitable for high-resolution, local reservoir characterization. In 1D media where the borehole is nearly vertical, data at the stationary-phase point is not conducive to conventional interferometry. Strong tube-wave noise generated by physical sources near the borehole interfere with S-wave splitting analyses. Also, converted P- to S-wave (PS-wave) polarity reversals occur at zero offset and cancel their recovery. We developed methods to eliminate tube-wave noise by removing physical sources at the stationary-phase point and perturbing the integration path in the integrand based on P-wave NMO velocity of the direct-arrival. This results in using nonphysical energy outside a Fresnel radius that could not have propagated between receivers. To limit the response near the stationary-phase point, we also applied a weighting condition to suppress energy from large offsets. For PS-waves, a derivative-like operator was applied to the physical sources at zero offset in the form of a polarity reversal. These methods resulted in effectively recovering P-wave dipole and PS-wave quadrupole pseudosource VSPs. The retrieved wavefields kinematically correspond to a vertical incidence representation of reflectivity/transmissivity and can be used for conventional P- and S-wave velocity analyses. Four-component PS-wave VSPs retrieve S-wave splitting in transmitted converted waves that provide calibration for PS-wave and P-wave azimuthal anisotropy measurements from surface-seismic data.
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