Relocating Mining Microseismic Earthquakes in a 3-D Velocity Model Using a Windowed Cross-Correlation Technique

Microseismic source location is a fundamental research interest in real-time microseismic monitoring and hazard risk assessment, and it provides the basis for determining the fracture zones and calculating seismic source parameters of the microseismicity (e.g., the event magnitude, the focal mechanism). In the present work, we carefully relocate some microseismic earthquakes that occurred in the Yongshaba mine (China) using the shooting 3-D ray-tracing (3D-RT) method based on a high-resolution 3-D velocity model, which is determined by a large amount of seismic data. Furthermore, a semiautomatic waveform cut method based on the cross-correlation (CC) technique (WCC) is developed for a quick, robust and precise determination of the direct P-phase relative delay times. Compared with the full waveform cross-correlation (FWCC)-based method, the WCC-based method is free from the influence of complex later-phase waveform spectra. To verify the proposed method, we artificially generate the locations of 892 synthetic microseismic events, the P-phase travel times of which are calculated based on the given 3-D velocity model and the 3-D ray-tracing technique. The relocated hypocentres of these synthetic events obtained by the developed method are improved compared with those obtained by a homogeneous velocity model and the straight line-ray tracing based L1 norm time difference (TD) method (HV-SL-TD1), as well as those obtained by the 3-D velocity model and the straight line-ray tracing based L1 norm and L2 norm TD methods (3D-SL-TD1 and 3D-SL-TD2). Finally, we apply the proposed method to eight experimental blasts with pre-measured locations. The synthetic and application tests show that, despite some multi-path phenomena existing in the ray-tracing methods, the WCC-based method performs as well as the experienced manual picking method, and the results obtained by the 3D-RT location have smaller location errors (~30 m) than those of the homogeneous velocity model-based methods (>40 m). The TD-based method is slightly better than the trigger time (TT)-based method when using the same norm, and the location precision of the L1 norm-based methods have a better resilience to larger picking errors than that of the L2 norm-based methods. Further improvements can be obtained by improving the resolution of the 3-D velocity model and including spatial voids in the model (e.g., tunnels and cavities) for the inversion.