A comparative study of different DAS vendors data

Jorge E. Monsegny, Donald C. Lawton, Daniel O. Trad

Distributed acoustic sensing is a technology with a high potential for seismic monitoring. Apart from the optical fibre, that is the sensing element and replaces the traditional geophone, the other part of this system is the interrogator that transforms the backscattered light from the fibre into a digital seismic signal. The fibre is usually installed permanently but the interrogator is interchangeable by newer and more sophisticated models but also by different vendors models. We compare distributed acoustic sensing data obtained at the same locations, with the same sources and optical fibre, and almost at the same frame time but generated by interrogators from three different vendors, at the Containment and Monitoring Institute Field Research Station in Alberta, Canada. We confront the DAS datasets before and after filtering and against vertically oriented geophone data. We found that after some data conditioning, all vendors agree in wave character at the early times, however, at later times there are delays in the events arrivals that depend on the trace depth.