Continuous Subsurface Monitoring by Passive Seismic with Distributed Acoustic Sensors - The “Stanford Array” Experiment

Continuous seismic monitoring can be a crucial tool to optimize hydrocarbon production as well as to provide early warning of potentially hazardous conditions developing in the subsurface. However, the cost of continuous monitoring is a significant obstacle to its widespread application. Distributed Acoustic Sensors (DAS) recording systems hold the promise to enable the recording of seismic data at much lower cost. We deployed a 2.45 km long DAS array with 610 virtual receivers under Stanford University campus and started to record passive seismic data continuously in September 2016. Preliminary analysis show that the data recorded by our DAS array can be used to monitor dynamic processes in the subsurface thanks to sufficient sensitivity to low-amplitude wavefields in the frequency band between .5 and 10 Hz. Our conclusion is supported by the coherency and the frequency content of recorded events corresponding to teleseismic and regional earthquakes as well as of the virtual sources synthesized by using interferometry.