A scientific framework for active and passive seismic imaging, with applications to blended data and micro-earthquake responses

Abstract

A unifying scientific framework is proposed that connects the different worlds of active and passive seismic methods. The involved seismic sources may be man-made or natural, they may be situated at the surface or in the subsurface, they may be impulsive or dispersive, the firing times may be user-controlled or unknown and the measured wavefields may contain any complexity. A link is made between the method of incoherent shooting (man-made blending) and the recording of passive data (natural blending). We particularly focus on the growing field of microseismics. The proposed framework leads to a three-step inversion scheme that uses both primary and multiple scattering as carriers of subsurface information (double illumination). Results of the scheme indicate that the double illumination concept is very attractive for micro-earthquake imaging. © 2011 The Authors Geophysical Journal International © 2011 RAS.