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Development of an instantaneous frequency estimation pipeline for compressional and shear wave arrival picking : application to quarry blast data

University of British Columbia

Many seismology applications such as earthquake hypocenter determination, source mechanism analysis, and hydrocarbon reservoir imaging, require accurate compressional and shear wave arrival time picking. Traditionally different seismological organizations have relied on human expert manual picking of seismic wave arrival and labeling. However as the number of seismic stations around the world rapidly grows, the need for automatic phase picking algorithms is increasing and requires the employment of large datasets. These algorithms need to distinguish between the different seismic phases, and accurately measure their onset. This thesis proposes a seismic signal processing pipeline application for automatic time picking of seismic compression waves (P) and shear waves (S). The algorithm picking accuracy is evaluated on quarry blasts seismic traces, and compared to manual expert picking. The proposed pipeline consists of three main segments: The data pre-processing segment focuses on Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) as a method of deconstructing multicomponent signals into monocomponent signals, followed by the Singular Spectral Analysis (SSA) method as a denoising filter. The data processing segment computes the instantaneous frequency (IF) using weighted least squares and Tychonov regularization with quadratic constraints. The data post-processing segment uses seismic signal IF estimation to pick the compressional and shear waves arrival times.

Text

2019-05-22

Attribution 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/70251

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/