Real-Time Seismic Imaging

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Introduction: Seismic imaging is the process of using seismic data to generate images of the subsurface. This process requires sending sound waves into the ground and detecting the echoes that bounce back from different types of rock and soil. The seismic survey market totaled $7.43 billion in 2017 and is estimated to total $9.28 billion by 2022, with a CAGR of 4.15%. This process is essential for oil and gas exploration as it produces images of the entire planet. More importantly, seismic imaging is critical in monitoring volcano dynamics. However, existing products of seismic imaging are not real-time and may take days to months to derive. As a result, only fewer than 20 stations of volcanoes are maintained due to the lack of a method of visualizing internal structures in the volcano edifice. Seismic imaging algorithms commonly used in industry and academia cannot be directly implemented under field circumstances as they rely on centralized algorithms and require massive amounts of raw seismic data. There is an urgent need to improve seismic imaging so it can illuminate the physical dynamics of the subsurface with high resolution and in real time. Technology: Georgia State University researchers have developed a method to generate seismic images in real-time through seismic signal communication and computation. This is a large-scale sensor network of low-cost geophysical stations that sense and analyze seismic signals and compute full-scale 4D fluid dynamics of an active volcano in real-time. The distributed tomography algorithm disperses the computation burden to the sensor system and performs real-time tomographic inversion within the network. It is like a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technique for observing and monitoring volcanoes.