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Many Hands Make Light Work at Distributed Acoustic Sensing Field Experience

Tags: DAS , short course

The hands-on Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) Field Experience was held at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado, gathering participants for intensive work exploring this exciting technology and the observations it enables. Attendees representing a broad range of research focus, career stage, prior experience with DAS, and institutions were brought together with DAS experts. This course was sponsored by the National Science Foundation under award EAR-1948737 and EAR-2148614.

Participants were led through introductory material, a tour of the campus facilities including the Ken Larner GeoMaker Space, fiber splicing in the lab environment, deployment of a fiber with geophone array for comparison, tap tests, review of collected data, as well as exercises in experiment planning, data management, and data analysis with the DASDAE software. Throughout the three-day program there was an emphasis on hands-on interaction and sharing real-world experience.

While DAS and its many applications have taken off in the past few years, particularly in geophysics, some researchers have not had the opportunity to work directly with the technology and instrumentation. “I have used DAS data before but I was never involved in a DAS deployment,” shared Andres Peña Castro, a post-doc at the University of New Mexico, “The field experience helped me to understand the difficulty or the advantages of having such [a] system available.”

More information on the course is available on its event page and you can learn more about the DASDAE software on the DASCore website. Those interested in DAS technology and future events are encouraged to join the DAS mailing list.

person wearing gloves carefully feeds cable into a box-shaped device
Mel Zhang, graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, loads a prepared fiber into the fusion splicer. (Photo: Kasey Aderhold)
person presenting in classroom points to graph on screen
Ge Jin, course instructor and professor at Colorado School of Mines, walks through exercises with the data collected on the fiber installed by participants. (Photo: Kasey Aderhold)
computer screen with people in grass college quad in background
Live data displayed from the installed fiber while in the background Eileen Martin, course instructor and professor at Colorado School of Mines, leads the collection of sources via a hammer. (Photo: Miguel Rodríguez-Domínguez)
group photo in front of glass building
The participants and instructors of the 2023 DAS RCN Field Experience and DASDAE tutorial on the campus at the Colorado School of Mines. (Photo: Kasey Aderhold)