Webcast | 2013 | March | Uncertainties in Surface and Downhole Microseismic

Title: A New Look at Surface and Downhole Microseismic Positional Uncertainty: A Statistics Based Approach
 
Date: March 26, 2013 at 10AM CST
 
Presenter: Michael Thornton, CTO MicroSeismic, Inc.
 
Summary:
This month’s webcast focuses on the presumption that the two competing microseismic imaging techniques in use today appear at first to be very dissimilar. Downhole microseismic locations are determined from P & S wave travel-time matching, much like traditional earthquake seismology, while surface microseismic imaging is more like pre-stack depth migration of reflection seismic. However, if one considers both techniques as maximum likelihood estimators (MLE), it is possible to show that the two are in fact quite similar. Moreover, the MLE framework provides a basis to compare the two methods in terms of the uncertainties in location estimates and sensitivity to velocity uncertainty.