SPIN ESR 1.2: Distributed acoustic sensing for natural hazard assessment

Name: Sebastian Noe drawing

Institution: ETH Zürich

Email: sebastian.noe@erdw.ethz.ch

Introduction

My name is Sebastian and I am a PhD-student at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology in Zurich in the Seismology and Wave Physics Group. My research interests encompass seismic simulations, theoretical aspects of inverse theory as well as newly emerging sensing technologies such as distributed acoustic sensing. Geophysics in general has always been particularly appealing to me because we somehow manage to describe the great outdoors with codes and numbers – except when we cannot. In my free, you can probably find me either hiking or skiing in the mountains.

Publication

A. Fichtner, F. Walter, P. Paitz, S. Klaasen, D.C. Bowden, S. Noe, N. Müller, D. Husmann, J. Morel, An illustrated guide to: Distributed and integrated fiber-optic sensing in seismology, Earthquake Science, 2025, http://www.equsci.org.cn/article/doi/10.1016/j.eqs.2024.09.006

S. Noe et al., The Collaborative Seismic Earth Model: Generation 2, JGR: Solid Earth, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1029/ 2024JB029656 J. Igel, S. Noe, et al., Challenges in submarine fiber-optic earthquake monitoring, JGR: Solid Earth, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JB029556

T.L.A. Schouten, L. Gebraad, S. Noe, A.J.P.Gülcher, S. Thrastarson, D.-P. van Herwaarden, A. Fichtner, Full-waveform inversion reveals diverse origins of lower mantle positive wave speed anomalies, Scientific reports, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-77399-2

A. Fichtner, S. Thrastarson, D.P. van Herwaarden, S. Noe, An illustrated guide to: Parsimonious multi-scale full-waveform inversion, Earthquake Science, 2024, http://www.equsci.org.cn/article/doi/10.1016/j.eqs.2024.07.004

S. Thrastarson, D.-P. van Herwaarden, S. Noe, C. J.Schiller, A. Fichtner, REVEAL: A Global Full-Waveform Inversion Model, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 2024, http://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/bssa/article-pdf/114/3/1392/6445281/bssa-2023273.1.pdf

N. Müller, S. Noe et al., Earthquake source inversion by integrated fiber-optic sensing, Seismica, 2024, https://seismica.library.mcgill.ca/article/view/1405/1569

J. Bott, S. Noe, et al., Density and strength variations in the mantle lithosphere and the distribution of intraplate earthquakes, Communications Earth & Environment, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01417-4

S. Noe, D. Husmann, N. Müller, J. Morel, A. Fichtner, Long-range fiber-optic earthquake sensing by active phase noise cancellation, Scientific Reports, 2023, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-41161-x

S Noe, S Yuan, J-P Montagner, H Igel, Anisotropic elastic parameter estimation from multicomponent ground-motion observations: a theoretical study, Geophysical Journal International, Volume 229, Issue 2, May 2022, Pages 1462–1473, https://doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggac006

Research progress

These are synthetics for an earthquake close to Mulhouse at a minimum period of 5 seconds for a 110 km long optical fiber between Basel and Bern. Simulations like these pave the way towards full-waveform inversion with distributed acoustic sensing.