Microseismic Moment-Tensor Inversion

It is common practice in the oil and gas industry to use a single vertical well with limited number of geophones to monitor the microseismicity induced by hydraulic fracture treatment. In this thesis, I have employed a synthetic and stochastic modeling approach to investigate the effects of monitoring geometry and noise on inverting recorded P- and S-wave amplitudes for the moment tensor and source parameters responsible for generating the observed seismograms. The results of the synthetic modeling have shown that microseismic moment-tensor inversion using data from a single vertical monitoring well is ill-conditioned and incapable of resolving all six components of the moment tensor. Mitigating this problem requires introducing new constraints and a-priori assumptions on inversion.