Field Trial of Distributed Acoustic Sensing Using Active Sources at Garner Valley, California

Abstract:

An optical fiber Distributed Acoustic Sensor array was deployed in a shallow trench at the site of the Garner Valley Downhole Array (GVDA) in southern California. The site was operated as a collaborator of the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) by UCSB. The fiber-optic cable layout approximated a rectangle whose dimensions were roughly 160 meters by 80 meters. The layout included two subdiagonals to provide a variety of orientations of the cable relative to source locations. The study included different seismic sources deployed at a number of surveyed positions: a 45 kN shear shaker operated at the site by NEES@UCLA, a portable 450 N shaker, a small Vibroseis truck, and hammer blows on a steel plate to map cable locations. Several dozen separate tests were recorded in which each test typically included ten repeats. The data were utilized for several studies. First, the characteristics of the recorded signals were analyzed for directivity and sensitivity of the cable response (Lancelle et al., 2014, this meeting). The DAS system recorded dynamic ground events in the direction of the cable and hence comparisons with geophones required signal processing. The one-meter spacing of DAS traces could be well correlated over distances of a few meters. Second, swept-sine sources were used to obtain surface-wave velocity dispersion to determine near-surface shear-wave velocity distribution using Multispectral Analysis of Surface Waves (MASW) (Baldwin et al., 2014, this meeting). The results were in good agreement with previous Vibroseis results at the site (Stokoe et al. 2004). Third, a new method for time-frequency filtering was developed for extracting the surface-wave phase velocities from uncorrelated receiver traces (Lord et al., 2014, this meeting).