Curvelet-Based Stochastic Noise Suppression for Downhole DAS Microseismic Data

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) converts fiber cables into dense strain-rate sensor arrays, capturing direct, reflected and guided seismic phases with ultra-fine spatial sampling. However, DAS interrogators suffer far stronger random noise than traditional geophones, limiting its microseismic imaging capacity. This work adopts curvelet-transform denoising to suppress noise. Curvelets partition the frequency–wavenumber plane into multiscale directional sectors; coherent wave energy concentrates in limited angular wedges, while stochastic noise disperses evenly across all transform coefficients, enabling noise-signal separation via wedge-wise thresholding. We test four default threshold schemes on synthetic downhole DAS microseismic data. Parameter tuning proves all methods deliver comparable performance, so we compare their out-of-box reliability for shale reservoir monitoring. Three noise-statistic-based strategies perform stably: median-absolute-deviation (MAD), quiet-window and empirical-cumulative-distribution-Function (ECDF percentile) thresholding. By contrast, the default knee-point algorithm from mainstream DAS toolboxes fails, as its preset threshold falls within noise components and barely removes interference. We propose MAD as a robust default for the tested downhole DAS microseismic setting for it estimates thresholds directly from noisy traces without blank reference windows and offers superior operational stability. Applied to field DAS records from a southwest China shale-gas horizontal monitor well, the MAD curvelet workflow greatly enhances microseismic arrivals with negligible spurious events. Benchmarks against standard 2D Daubechies-4 wavelet and adaptive Goldstein FK filtering verify curvelet denoising as a physically interpretable, efficient tool for DAS wavefields.