Microseismic Event Identification and Localization in Vertical Wells Using Distributed Acoustic Sensing

Microseismic identification and localization of signals from single-component distributed optical fiber acoustic sensors (DAS) in vertical wells are limited by low signal-to-noise ratio and lack of directional information, making effective signal identification and accurate localization difficult. Improving the detection rate and accuracy of such data events is helpful for analyzing the effect of fracturing. To address this, this paper proposes a method for automatically picking and locating microseismic events based on dual fitting modeling and waveform inversion. First, empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is used to adaptively decompose and reconstruct the original DAS signal to filter out approximately 80% of high-frequency noise (noise above 200 Hz). Second, the classic short-time average/long-time average energy ratio algorithm is used to pick all “event points.” Finally, DBSCAN density clustering and RANSAC robust fitting are combined to perform secondary screening and fitting modeling of the “event points” to obtain the continuous event arrival time distribution along the well section direction, and the spatial location of the seismic source is inverted based on the fitting results. Tested with experimental data from Well XX, the automatic detection rate reached 96%, and the accuracy of machine detection compared with manual judgment reached 95%.