A nonparametric method for automatic denoising of microseismic data

Abstract

Noise suppression or signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) enhancement is often desired for better processing results from a microseismic dataset. In this paper, we proposed a nonparametric automatic denoising algorithm for microseismic data. The method consists of three major steps: (1) applying a two-step AIC algorithm to pick P-wave arrival; (2) subtracting the noise power spectrum from the signal power spectrum; (3) recovering the microseismic signal by inverse Fourier transform. The proposed method is tested on synthetic datasets with different signal types and SNRs, as well as field datasets. The results of the proposed method are compared against ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) and wavelet denoising methods, which shows the effectiveness of the method for denoising and improving the SNR of microseismic data.