Fast GPU-Based Seismogram Simulation from Microseismic Events in Marine Environments Using Heterogeneous Velocity Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces a GPU-accelerated method for rapidly generating synthetic seismograms from microseismic events in marine environments using heterogeneous velocity models, enabling efficient simulation of complex seismic patterns.

Contribution

It presents a novel GPU-based numerical solution for 3D elastic wave equations in marine settings, improving speed and scalability over traditional CPU methods.

Findings

GPU implementation significantly reduces computation time.

Effective simulation of hundreds of microseismic events with various source mechanisms.

Visualizations demonstrate realistic seismic activity patterns.

Abstract

A novel approach is presented for fast generation of synthetic seismograms due to microseismic events, using heterogeneous marine velocity models. The partial differential equations (PDEs) for the 3D elastic wave equation have been numerically solved using the Fourier domain pseudo-spectral method which is parallelizable on the graphics processing unit (GPU) cards, thus making it faster compared to traditional CPU based computing platforms. Due to computationally expensive forward simulation of large geological models, several combinations of individual synthetic seismic traces are used for specified microseismic event locations, in order to simulate the effect of realistic microseismic activity patterns in the subsurface. We here explore the patterns generated by few hundreds of microseismic events with different source mechanisms using various combinations, both in event amplitudes and origin times, using the simulated pressure and three component particle velocity fields via 1D, 2D and 3D seismic visualizations.