Arrival picking of microseismic events using the SLPEA algorithm

Arrival picking of microseismic events is a crucial step in microseismic data processing.There are a lot of microseismic events with low signal-to-noise ratio(SNR)in field datasets,and the arrival times of these events picked using conventional approaches are usually not satisfying.To overcome the weakness of low noise resistibility of the conventional approaches,a new method,called the SLPEA algorithm,is developed based on the differences in amplitudes,polarization characteristics and statistic properties between seismic signal and ambient noise.To examine its feasibility and effectiveness,the proposed method is applied to both synthetic and field datasets,and the results are compared with those from conventional approaches and handpicking.Analysis of these results demonstrates that the average of the absolute errors between the results of the proposed method and hand-picking are only 1.33×10-3 s,which is less than 3samples,and the variance is 3.21×10-6s2.The percentage of the arrival times which is within±0.005 sof the hand-picking results is 95.8%.All these parameters are superior to those of the conventional approaches,which proves the reliability of the proposed method.