DeepPhasePick: A method for detecting and picking seismic phases from local earthquakes based on highly optimized convolutional and recurrent deep neural networks

Abstract

Summary Seismic phase detection, identification and first-onset picking are basic but essential routines to analyse earthquake data. As both the number of seismic stations, globally and regionally, and the number of experiments greatly increase due to ever greater availability of instrumentation, automated data processing becomes more and more essential. E.g., for modern seismic experiments involving 100s to even 1,000s instruments, conventional human analyst-based identification and picking of seismic phases is becoming unfeasible, and the introduction of automatic algorithms mandatory. In this paper, we introduce DeepPhasePick, an automatic two-stage method that detects and picks P and S seismic phases from local earthquakes. The method is entirely based on highly optimized deep neural networks, consisting of a first stage that detects the phases using a convolutional neural network, and a second stage that uses two recurrent neural networks to pick both phases. Detection is performed on three-component seismograms. P- and S-picking is then conducted on the vertical and the two-horizontal components, respectively. Systematic hyperparameter optimization was applied to select the best model architectures and to define both the filter applied to preprocess the seismic data as well as the characteristics of the window sample used to feed the models. We trained DeepPhasePick using seismic records extracted from two sets of manually-picked event waveforms originating from northern Chile (∼39,000 records for detection and ∼36,000 records for picking). In different tectonic regimes, DeepPhasePick demonstrated the ability to both detect P and S phases from local earthquakes with high accuracy, as well as predict P- and S-phase time onsets with an analyst level of precision. DeepPhasePick additionally computes onset uncertainties based on the Monte Carlo Dropout technique as an approximation of Bayesian inference. This information can then further feed an associator algorithm in an earthquake location procedure.