Evaluation of the correlation between passive velocity tomography and mining seismic activity

Mining seismic activity is an important factor in assessing the risk of rockbursts in coal mines. In order to predict the mining seismic activity, this study uses qualitative and quantitative analysis methods to explore the correlation between passive velocity tomography and future seismic activity in mines. For qualitative analysis, we compared the similarity between the areas with high longitudinal wave (P-wave) velocity and those with future high seismic activity. 87.5% of cases showed moderate to strong correlation. For quantitative analysis, we calculated the percentage of seismic events with different energy magnitudes, which were located in the velocity area where the velocity anomaly coefficient A_n exceeds thresholds of 5%, 15%, and 25%, respectively. In the velocity area where A_n exceeds 5%, it has good prediction efficiency for various energy levels of seismic events, with an average prediction efficiency of over 80%. A baseline model was used to show that the seismicity prediction performance of velocity tomography is superior to random prediction. Therefore, the results have demonstrated the effectiveness of using velocity tomography to predict and indicate areas where future seismic activities are likely to occur. This study provides significant potential for evaluating and predicting the risk of rockburst hazard in deep coal mines.