Deep learning for seismic phase detection and picking in the aftershock zone of 2008 Mw7.9 Wenchuan earthquake
This provides a practical solution for seismic monitoring in less studied regions where labeled data is scarce, though it is incremental as it builds on existing CNN approaches.
The paper tackled the problem of seismic phase detection and picking in regions with limited labeled data by developing a CNN-based Phase-Identification Classifier (CPIC), which achieved 97.5% detection of manually picked phases and a five-times improvement in arrival time prediction over existing methods, while maintaining over 95% accuracy with only a few thousand training samples.
The increasing volume of seismic data from long-term continuous monitoring motivates the development of algorithms based on convolutional neural network (CNN) for faster and more reliable phase detection and picking. However, many less studied regions lack a significant amount of labeled events needed for traditional CNN approaches. In this paper, we present a CNN-based Phase- Identification Classifier (CPIC) designed for phase detection and picking on small to medium sized training datasets. When trained on 30,146 labeled phases and applied to one-month of continuous recordings during the aftershock sequences of the 2008 MW 7.9 Wenchuan Earthquake in Sichuan, China, CPIC detects 97.5% of the manually picked phases in the standard catalog and predicts their arrival times with a five-times improvement over the ObsPy AR picker. In addition, unlike other CNN-based approaches that require millions of training samples, when the off-line training set size of CPIC is reduced to only a few thousand training samples the accuracy stays above 95%. The online implementation of CPIC takes less than 12 hours to pick arrivals in 31-day recordings on 14 stations. In addition to the catalog phases manually picked by analysts, CPIC finds more phases for existing events and new events missed in the catalog. Among those additional detections, some are confirmed by a matched filter method while others require further investigation. Finally, when tested on a small dataset from a different region (Oklahoma, US), CPIC achieves 97% accuracy after fine tuning only the fully connected layer of the model. This result suggests that the CPIC developed in this study can be used to identify and pick P/S arrivals in other regions with no or minimum labeled phases.