Imaging microseismic events by diffraction stacking with moment tensor inversion

Microseismic monitoring can greatly benefit from imaging events with low signal-to-noise ratio as the number of low signal events grows exponentially. Hence, developing a migration-type detection and location technique has a potential to greatly improve microseismic monitoring. We developed a new methodology using stacking of seismic phases and amplitudes along diffraction traveltime curves together with polarization correction by seismic moment tensor inversion. This provided a calibrated model and imaged the perforation shots as non-shear events. We processed one day of data from microseismic monitoring of shale stimulation. The induced events are mostly shear events forming trends along the maximum horizontal stress direction and above the injection intervals.