Scaling up to city-wide dark-fiber seismic arrays: Lessons from five years of the Stanford DAS array project Available to Purchase

In the five years since we started the Stanford DAS-array project substantial progress have been made towards the goal of deploying city-wide dark-fiber seismic arrays that have the potential for improving the quality and safety of urban life. Four applications are the most promising: 1) nearsurface imaging and monitoring, 2) local-seismicity analysis, 3) traffic monitoring, and 4) infrastructure monitoring. Scaling up current small research arrays to citywide arrays is crucial for all of these applications to deliver real practical value. DAS interrogators improvements in range and sensitivity are decreasing unit-length cost and logistic challenges of large-scale deployments. Timely delivery of valuable information depends on developments of fast and automatic algorithms, such as neural networks running on cost-efficient hardware. Further progress are also necessary in specialized technologies such as the mapping of DAS virtual channels to physical locations, and fast signalenhancement methods.