DAS and geophones are the two most popular sensors for borehole seismic acquisition. As such, it is important to get a good understanding of how these two types of sensors compare to each other. The natural measurand for the techniques is different; millivolts are approximately proportional to particle velocities for geophones vs. changes in the phase of light linked to the changes in strain on the sensing fibre. This paper focuses on the experimental comparison of absolute values of these measurands derived from a VSP survey acquired in Curtin GeoLab training well. We describe the acquisition setup for the walk-away VSP acquired with DAS and geophones, allowing the direct comparison and the workflow, which we can use to represent the data in strain rate. Albeit this is unlikely to be universal, we find that the absolute values are similar for this experimental setup.
Keywords: DAS; borehole seismic; geophones; innovative technologies.