Passive microseismic record first-break enhancement method

A computer software product, comprising a non-transitory medium readable by a processor, the non-transitory medium having stored thereon a set of instructions for implementing a passive microseismic record first-break enhancement method, the set of instructions including:

• a first sequence of instructions which, when executed by the processor, causes said processor to accept for processing a manually picked first break from a raw data record of a microseismic event, the manually picked first break having a saved pick time tr, where tr is the timing of the microseismic event on reference traces extracted from the raw data record;
• a second sequence of instructions which, when executed by the processor, causes said processor to cross-correlate all distinct trace pairs of the raw data record;
• a third sequence of instructions which, when executed by the processor, causes said processor to pick and save timing (dti) of a maximum value of an i-th cross-correlation for all i=1, . . . , N;
• a fourth sequence of instructions which, when executed by the processor, causes said processor to align a maxima of the cross-correlations at t=0 by applying a shift of dti to each i-th cross-correlation, thereby nulling an inter-receiver offset effect;
• a fifth sequence of instructions which, when executed by the processor, causes said processor to stack the aligned cross-correlations to produce a stacked aligned cross-correlation;
• and
• a sixth sequence of instructions which, when executed by the processor, causes said processor to shift the stacked aligned cross-correlation by an amount of tm=tr+dtrm, where dtrm indicates the timing of the maximum value of the cross-correlation between the m-th trace and the reference trace (m=1, . . . , M), thereby producing enhanced traces.