Efficient Seismic Source Localization Using Simplified Gaussian Beam Time Reversal Imaging

With the dramatic growth of seismic data volume, efficient and accurate seismic source location has become a significant challenge to seismologists. Recently, time reversal imaging (TRI) has been widely applied in automatic seismic source location for its robustness and accuracy, but its wave-equation-based implementation is usually computationally expensive. To achieve an efficient in situ and real-time source location, the emerging sensor network is a good option. In this article, we propose a simplified Gaussian beam TRI (SGTRI) method to implement the seismic source location in a distributed sensor network. Gaussian beam (GB) is a high-frequency asymptotic solution of the wave equation, which can help reduce the computation costs of the wavefield extrapolation in conventional TRI. Traditionally, the GB construction for reflection seismic imaging covers the entire subsurface space. However, for certain source localization, only limited areas contribute. Thus, we propose a beamforming-technique-based simplified GB construction to further boost efficiency. Then, we propose an imaging condition for the SGTRI to construct the final source location map. Using synthetic experiments, we demonstrate the accuracy, robustness, and efficiency of the proposed method compared with conventional TRI. In the end, a field application also shows promising results.