Cross-Correlation Migration of Microseismic Source Location with Multiplication Imaging Condition

Locating microseismic sources are critical in hydraulic fracturing monitoring for unconventional oil/gas exploration. Waveform-based methods can reliably and automatically image microseismic source locations, but they usually need to scan the source excitation time. The cross-correlation migration (CCM) avoids excitation time scanning and reduces the total scanning dimensions from 4D (3D in space and 1D in time) to 3D. The conventional CCM sums all the contributions obtained from the virtual trace gathers, which leads to low resolution source location image. In this study, we propose to use the multiplication imaging condition (MIC) to replace the summation imaging condition which is used in CCM, and name it as CCM-MIC. Instead of summing all contributions obtained from the virtual trace gathers, the CCM-MIC multiply them to form the final image. By using CCM-MIC, it is more meaningful to select less receivers with good azimuthal coverage, rather than to use a large amount of indiscriminate receivers, which is required by CCM. Our approach is also beneficial for crustal scales seismology applications