Monitoring of fields using body and surface waves reconstructed from passive seismic ambient noise

There are important economic, environmental and societal reasons for monitoring production from oil, gas and geothermal fields. Unfortunately, standard microseismic monitoring is often not useful due to low levels of microseismicity. We propose to use body and surface waves reconstructed from ambient seismic noise for such monitoring. In this work, we use seismic data recorded from a dense sensor array at the Groningen gas field in northern Holland and show how direct P-waves can be extracted from the ambient noise cross correlations and then used to monitor seismic velocity variations over time. This approach has advantages over the use of coda wave interferometry due to the ability to localise such changes in the subsurface. We show how both direct and refracted (head) P-waves as well as Rayleigh surface waves can be used for such field monitoring, with changes of ∼1% being resolved. Both fundamental and first overtone Rayleigh waves are used to localise such changes, which correspond nicely to known geology to within 100 m.