Seismological Applications of Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS)

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), an emerging technology in solid Earth geophysics, provides new avenue to perform array seismology by transforming a single fibre-optic cable into a continuous sensing element which can collect broadband data at ~1 metre-spacing.

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Meghan Miller
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The newly developed distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) instrument transforms how we can image and monitor the Earth at high spatio-temporal resolution. The instrument repurposes fibre-optic cables into thousands of seismometers at meter-spacing. The DAS interrogator records the strain rate along the fibre due to both transient propagating seismic wavefields and long-term change in subsurface. 

DAS for seismic imaging

We seek PhD students to work on the ARC Future Fellowship Lighting Up Dark Fibre for Seismic Imaging Project, which will involve involve fieldwork in Australia and New Zealand, setting up a DAS array and significant computation component analysing large datasets (up to 10s TB).  We encourage students with strong physics and/or mathematics background, and interests in signal-processing, time series analysis and seismology to apply.  Prior field/research experience and computer programming skills (e.g. Python, C, Matlab, Unix/Linux scripting) are highly desirable.  

ANU supervisors: Dr. Voon Hui Lai and Prof Meghan Miller  - For Honours, Masters and PhD projects

Investigating broadband seismic response of a Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) array 

Many techniques developed for conventional seismometers can be applied to DAS; however, the differences between recorded DAS amplitude and true ground motion from seismometers are not well-understood and may also vary case. We seek a motivated Masters student to analyse a wide range of data (local to global) recorded by a DAS array and co-located seismometers with the goal to compare their performances for DAS amplitude calibration.   This Masters project is co-funded by Geoscience Australia.

GA supervisor: Alexei Gorbatov - co- supervisor for GA-funded Masters projects 

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