Microseismic Source Characterization Combining Compressive Sensing with a Migration-based Methodology

Compressive sensing theory combined with migration-based techniques provides an alternative for fast simultaneous estimation of origin time, location and moment tensor of microseismic events. This work presents a description of the mathematical aspects of such methodology followed by a numerical example in a 1D layered isotropic medium with receivers deployed on the surface of the earth. Increasing the level of compression into the imaging process reduces the processing time at the expense of introducing distortions into the resulting images. The obtained results are encouraging to continue the analysis of compressive sensing as a tool for near real-time estimation of source mechanisms in microseismic monitoring from surface monitoring arrays.