Migration-based near real-time detection and location of microearthquakes with parallel computing

Prompt detection and accurate location of microseismic events are of great importance in seismic monitoring at local scale and become essential steps in monitoring underground activities, such as oil and gas production, geothermal exploitation and underground gas storage, for implementing effective control procedures to limit the induced seismicity hazard. In this study, we describe an automatic and robust earthquake detection and location procedure that exploits high-performance computing and allows the analysis of microseismic events in near real-time using the full waveforms recorded by a local seismic network. The implemented technique, called MigraLoc, is based on the space-time migration of continuous waveform data and consists of the following steps: (1) enhancement of P and S arrivals in noisy signals through a characteristic function, by means of the time-frequency analysis of the seismic records; (2) blind event location based on delay-and-sum approach systematically scanning...