High-Resolution Seismic Imaging for Geothermal Exploration at Eleven-Mile Canyon in Nevada

Abstract

U.S. Navy Geothermal Program acquired seismic data along five lines at Eleven-Mile Canyon in Nevada for geothermal exploration. The data contains significant ground-roll noise and reflection signals are week, resulting in a great challenge to image subsurface structures. We successfully remove the ground-roll noise using our newly developed wavenumber-adaptive frequency-space filtering technique. We then build anisotropic models along the five lines using anisotropic full-waveform inversion of the seismic data. Finally, we perform anisotropic reverse-time migration using the anisotropic models and our newly processed seismic data to obtain high-resolution subsurface images at Eleven-Mile Canyon. Our anisotropic full-waveform inversion and anisotropic reverse-time migration provide high-resolution images at Eleven-Mile Canyon, and these images could be useful for geothermal exploration in combination with imaging results of other geophysical data.