oa Goodbye Noise, Hello Signal! Improving Microseismic Monitoring in Noisy Environments

Over the last decade, Petroleum Development of Oman have deployed several microseismic monitoring systems. Due to the maturity of many of the oilfields in Oman, anthropogenic noise is in abundance. Given that the magnitude of some of the microseismic events can be as low as M = -3, noise can seriously hamper the detection and/or processing of such events. This paper describes PDO's experiments on new hardware and software to increase S/N. We show some examples of how our implementaion techniques improved event detection thresholds. In addition, we propose simple solutions that are not only more effective at noise reduction, but are also cheaper both in implementation and in reducing the subsequent cost of data processing.