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Modelling and Model Performance Assessment of the Spatiotemporal Development of Event Rates and Event Clustering for Induced Seismicity in the Groningen Gas Field

Description: 

Induced seismicity due to natural gas production from the Groningen field has been steadily on the rise from the first instrumental recording in 1991 into the first half of the 2010s. In a societal context of accelerating damage rates, safety concerns and public outrage, the national government ultimately decided to reduce production as much as possible. A minimal level of production is currently maintained as required for the security of supply within the national energy budget.
Hazard and risk forecasts for the seismicity in the Groningen field rely to a large extent on a source model that relates production to seismicity rates. The state-of-the-art model combines pressure diffusion and reservoir geometry into a spatiotemporal stress proxy that predicts seismicity rates with an exponential trend and includes ETAS clustering. For the last half decade both the model forecast and the observations show a decline in seismicity. The last couple of years however, it seems that the model is underpredicting the number of events. This may be due to an underestimation of the expected rates, and/or an underestimation of the annual variability. The former may be caused by, e.g., unaccounted delays, the latter, by, e.g., unaccounted trends in clustering intensity.
We assess the performance of the state-of-the art model in terms of the spatiotemporal seismicity distribution according to CSEP testing criteria and variations thereupon, and explore directions of model improvement for enhanced forecasting performance.

Session: New Methods and Models for More Informative Earthquake Forecasting

Type: Oral

Date: 4/19/2023

Presentation Time: 11:00 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Dirk A. Kraaijpoel

Student Presenter: No

Invited Presentation: 

Authors