Studying induced seismicity within the EPOS Thematic Core Service on Anthropogenic Hazards (TCS-AH)
Abstract
The EPOS TCS-AH brings together a broad community interested in Anthropogenic Hazards (AH) related to induced seismicity. It is designed as a functional e-research infrastructure that provides access to a large set of relevant data and allows free experimentations in a virtual laboratory, promoting interdisciplinary collaborations between stakeholders (the scientific community, industrial partners and society). The platform provides datasets as Episodes, which comprehensively describe AH cases for infrastructures, people and/or environment. They are grouped in several categories of subsurface exploitations: CO2 sequestration, conventional hydrocarbon extraction, geothermal energy production, reservoir impoundment, unconventional hydrocarbon extraction, underground gas storage, underground mining, and wastewater injection. They gather datasets relevant for the considered hazards (e.g. seismic, air/water quality), industrial data (e.g. well path, injection rates, mining front advance, gas production, water level), and other geodata (e.g. geological section, velocity model, faults, shear wave velocity, bathymetric map). Two local data centers (eNodes: IG-PAS/Poland and CDGP-EOST/France) provide metadata and data to the TCS-AH platform in commonly used standards and formats (e.g. miniSEED, GeoTIFF, and .mat). A registration/authorization is mandatory to access some data covered by restriction imposed by data industry providers or shared data embargoed by running projects. The platform grants access to an application portfolio, designed for the AH area, and addressing: (1) basic services for data integration and handling; (2) services for physical models of stress/strain changes over time and space as driven by geo-resource production; (3) services for analyses of geophysical signals; (4) services to extract the relation between technological operations and observed induced seismic/deformation; (5) services to quantitative probabilistic assessments of anthropogenic seismic hazard - statistical properties of anthropogenic seismic series and their dependence on time-varying anthropogenesis; ground motion prediction equations; stationary and time-dependent probabilistic seismic hazard estimates, related to time-changeable technological factors inducing the seismic process; (6) simulator for multi-hazard/multi-risk assessment in exploration/exploitation of georesources (MERGER) - numerical estimate of the occurrence probability of chains of events or processes impacting the environment.