Multivariate homogeneity testing in a northern case study in the province of Quebec,Canada

In regional frequency analysis, the examination of the regional homogeneity represents an important step of the procedure. Flood events possess multivariate characteristics which can not be handled by classical univariate regional procedures. For instance, classical procedures do not allow to assess regional homogeneity while taking into consideration flood peak, volume and duration. Chebana and Ouarda proposed multivariate discordancy and homogeneity tests. They carried out a simulation study to evaluate the performance of these tests. In the present paper, practical aspects are investigated jointly on flood peak and flood volume of a data set from the Côte‐Nord region in the province of Quebec, Canada. It is shown that, after removing the discordant sites, the remaining ones constitute a homogeneous region for the volumes and heterogeneous region for the peaks. However, if both variables are jointly considered, the obtained region is possibly homogeneous. Furthermore, the results demonstrate the usefulness of the bivariate test to take into account the dependence structure between the variables representing the event, and to take advantage of more information from the hydrograph. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Characterization of a carbonate reservoir using elastic full-waveform inversion of vertical seismic profile data

Two-dimensional elastic full waveform inversion was applied to two lines extracted from a spiral three-dimensional vertical seismic profile data acquired in an oilfield offshore, Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. The lines were selected to be parallel and perpendicular to the plane defined by the deviated borehole. The purpose of the inversion was to derive high-resolution elastic properties of the subsurface. After pre-processing, the data were band-pass filtered with a minimum frequency of 3.5 Hz and a maximum frequency of 30 Hz. A sequential inversion approach was used to mitigate non-linearity. The pre-processing of the data consisted in the removal of bad traces, followed by amplitude and phase corrections. High-resolution P- and S-wave velocity models that show good correlations with the available sonic logs were obtained. The results of the inversion suggest that the oilfield consists of a stack of layers with varying lithology, porosity and possibly fluid content.     

Accuracy of the master-event and double-difference locations: synthetic tests and application to seismicity in West Bohemia, Czech Republic

The relative locations of earthquake hypocentres determined with the master-event (ME) or the double-difference (DD) methods are more accurate and less dispersive compared to the absolute locations. In this paper, we conduct synthetic tests to assess the accuracy of the ME and DD location methods, to study the effects of the control parameters on the locations and possible distortions of the foci geometry. The results indicate that the DD locations are, in general, more accurate than the ME locations and perform significantly better for large earthquake clusters due to their independence of the master event position. The location precision, however, strongly depends on the control parameters used. If the control parameters are optimally chosen, the location errors can be considerably reduced. Moreover, it is proved that no distortion such as artificial clustering of foci is introduced if relative locations are used. Finally, the efficiency of both location methods is exemplified on locations of swarm micro-earthquakes that occurred in the West Bohemia region, Czech Republic, in order to reveal a detailed geometry of the active fault zone.