Picking microseismic first arrival times by Kalman filter and wavelet transform

Baolin Qiao, John C. Bancroft

Due to the high energy content of the ambient noise, microseismic monitoring system records considerable err oneous data. To pick up the first arrival times, special techniques must be applied due to the very low signal to noise ratio data. This paper present s three techniques: wavelet transform is applied to de-noising the noisy data; Kalman filter and modified STA/LTA method are implemented to pick up th e first arrival times. The results show that the first arrival times are picked up accurately even in very noisy data by incorporating these technique s.