Development of a high-performance seismic phase picker using deep learning in the Hakone volcanic area

Abstract

In volcanic regions, active earthquake swarms often occur in association with volcanic activity, and their rapid detection and analysis are crucial for volcano disaster prevention. Currently, these processes are ultimately left to human judgment and require significant time and money, making detailed real-time verification impossible. To overcome this issue, we attempted to apply machine learning, which has been successfully applied to various seismological fields to date. For seismic phase pick, several models have already been trained using a large amount of training data (mainly crustal earthquakes). Although there are some cases in which these models can be applied without any problems, regional dependence on pre-trained models has been reported. Since this study targets earthquakes in a volcanic region, applying existing pre-trained models may be difficult. Therefore, in this study, we compared three models; the publicly available trained model (model 0), a model which was trained with approximately 220,000 P- and S-wave onset reading data recorded at the Hakone volcano from 1999 to 2020 with initialized parameters (model 1) using the same architecture, and a model fine-tuned with the aforementioned Hakone data using the parameters of model 0 as initial values (model 2), and evaluated their phase identification performance for the Hakone data. As a result, the seismic phase detection rates of models 1 and 2 were much higher than those of model 0. However, small-amplitude signals are often missed when multiple seismic events occur within a detection time window. Therefore, we created training data with two earthquakes in the same time window, retrained the model using the data, and successfully detected events that previously would have been missed. In addition, it was found that more events were detected by setting the threshold to a low probability value for detection, increasing the number of seismic phase detections, and filtering by phase association and hypocenter location. Graphical Abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.].