Monitoring human impact: DAS and the future of urban seismology

Urban environments generate complex seismic wavefields from overlapping anthropogenic and natural sources. These wavefields challenge traditional seismological methods but can also be used to monitor and quantify human impact on the subsurface, infrastructure, and environment in cities. Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) transforms urban seismic monitoring by leveraging existing fiber-optic infrastructure for dense and cost-effective sensing. This opportunistic approach provides unprecedented spatial resolution but requires new analytical frameworks to handle the complexity of the data and the sensitivity of DAS to strain and small-scale heterogeneities.

We consider how DAS can support smart city infrastructure health monitoring, groundwater management, and assessment of climate-driven subsurface changes, enabling more resilient and adaptive cities, but also address the challenges associated with leveraging urban DAS recordings, e.g. complex wavefields, non-traditional sources, and data privacy.

Finally, we will show how DAS sensing systems support high-precision physics experiments such as particle accelerators and gravitational wave observatories, turning research campi into smart science cities.