Seismic noise interferometry for phase transmission fibre optics

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of phase transmission fibre optics for seismic ambient noise interferometry over long distances, providing theoretical insights and testing on real data to enable seismic imaging and tomography.

Contribution

It offers a theoretical framework for seismic noise interpretation in phase transmission fibre optics and demonstrates its application on actual data from a long-range optical network.

Findings

Autocorrelation of phase noise can be used for seismic analysis.

Synthetic and real data comparisons reveal interpretative challenges.

Long-range fibre optics have potential for seismic tomography.

Abstract

Similar to Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), phase transmission fibre optics allows for large bandwidth seismic data measurements using fibre-optic cables. However, while the application range of DAS is limited to tens of kilometres, phase transmission fibre optics has an application range that can go up to thousands of kilometres. This new method has been shown as an effective method to record earthquakes, but its ability to record ambient seismic noise that can be used for seismic imaging and tomography is still up for question, and will be analysed in this work. We provide the theoretical foundation for the interpretation of seismic noise autocorrelations and interferometry from phase transmission fibre optics. Further, we test the model on actual phase transmission data sourced from a phase-stabilised optical frequency network in Switzerland. There, the phase stabilisation scheme measures and compensates noise on the optical phase caused by distortions of the fibre. We analyse the autocorrelation of the measured phase noise correction and explore potential interpretations by comparing it with the autocorrelation of a synthetically computed phase noise correction. This comparison is challenging due to two factors: the intricate cable geometry increases the computational cost of generating synthetic data, and the precise location and geometry of the cable are uncertain. Despite these difficulties, we believe that when applied to a different dataset, this approach could enable seismic tomography with ambient noise interferometry using a long-range fibre-optic sensing device.