DANTE: Physics-Informed Neural Operator for DAS-to-Velocity Waveform Reconstruction Without Co-located Seismometers

TL;DR

DANTE is a physics-informed neural operator that reconstructs particle velocity waveforms from DAS strain rate data without co-located seismometers, using synthetic training and physics constraints to improve accuracy and noise suppression.

Contribution

This work introduces a neural operator trained solely on synthetic data that enforces physics constraints, enabling accurate DAS-to-velocity conversion without additional sensors.

Findings

Achieves a mean output SNR of 15.3 dB on synthetic data.

Outperforms conventional methods with up to 28.8 dB SNR improvement.

Generalizes well to real microseismic events without fine-tuning.

Abstract

Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) converts existing fibre-optic cables into dense seismic arrays at near-zero deployment cost, but measures strain rate rather than particle velocity -- the quantity required by virtually all seismological analysis tools. Converting strain rate to particle velocity by numerical integration is ill-posed: the integration constant is undefined and noise accumulates without bound. We present DANTE (DAS-to-velocity via physics-informed neural operator for Acoustic-wave recoNstruction in heTErogeneous media), a Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) trained entirely on synthetic data that enforces two physics constraints: (i) the exact kinematic relation between DAS strain rate and the spatial gradient of particle velocity, and (ii) the one-dimensional elastic wave equation. These constraints resolve the undetermined integration constant and suppress noise without requiring co-located seismometers. On a test set of 200 heterogeneous synthetic wavefields, DANTE achieves a mean output SNR of $15.3 \pm 8.8$ dB, Pearson correlation $r = 0.907$, and SSIM $= 0.976$, corresponding to a mean SNR improvement of approximately $+15$ dB over the best conventional baseline (trace stacking, $n = 10$, $0.02 \pm 0.06$ dB), and up to $+28.8$ dB on the most challenging samples. Zero-shot inference on seven real microseismic events from the Utah FORGE 2019 DAS dataset yields a kinematic residual of 0.003--0.005, five times lower than the synthetic test baseline, confirming generalisation to real field data with no fine-tuning and no seismometers.