Abstract: This invention provides a method for characterizing natural fracture networks or other textural networks in an Earth formation when using microseismic monitoring of a hydraulic fracturing job. The method comprises receiving (120) microseismic data from a hydraulic fracturing event, identifying a data subset (153) comprising components of the microseismic data associated with the one or more hydraulic fractures; and obtaining a remainder dataset (156) of the microseismic data by removing the subset from the microseismic data. One approach for identifying the data subset, after removing high uncertainty microseismic events, is to create a Voronoi diagram of a plurality of cells each associated with one of the microseismic events, determine a density for each cell, create a connectivity matrix of the high density cells and identify event clusters in the connectivity matrix which are aligned with a main growing direction of the hydraulic fracture.

Abstract: This invention provides a method for characterizing natural fracture networks or other textural networks in an Earth formation when using microseismic monitoring of a hydraulic fracturing job. The method comprises receiving (120) microseismic data from a hydraulic fracturing event, identifying a data subset (153) comprising components of the microseismic data associated with the one or more hydraulic fractures; and obtaining a remainder dataset (156) of the microseismic data by removing the subset from the microseismic data. One approach for identifying the data subset, after removing high uncertainty microseismic events, is to create a Voronoi diagram of a plurality of cells each associated with one of the microseismic events, determine a density for each cell, create a connectivity matrix of the high density cells and identify event clusters in the connectivity matrix which are aligned with a main growing direction of the hydraulic fracture.