A multi-task encoder-decoder to separating earthquake and ambient 1
noise signal in seismograms
Abstract
Seismograms contain multiple sources of seismic waves, from distinct
transient signals such as earthquakes to ambient seismic vibrations such
as microseism. Ambient vibrations contaminate the earthquake signals,
while the earthquake signals pollute the ambient noise’s statistical
properties necessary for ambient-noise seismology analysis. Separating
ambient noise from earthquake signals would thus benefit multiple
seismological analyses. This work develops a multi-task encoder-decoder
network to separate transient signals from ambient signals directly in
the time domain for 3-component seismograms. We choose the
active-volcanic Big Island in Hawai’i as a natural laboratory given its
richness in transients (tectonic and volcanic earthquakes) and diffuse
ambient noise (strong microseism). The approach takes a noisy seismogram
as input and independently predicts the earthquake and noise waveforms.
The model is trained on earthquake and noise waveforms from the
STandford EArthquake Dataset (STEAD) and on the local noise of a seismic
station. We estimate the network’s performance using the Explained
Variance (EV) metric on both earthquake and noise waveforms. We explore
different network architectures and find that the long-short-term-memory
bottleneck performs best over other structures, which we refer to as the
WaveDecompNet. Overall we find that WaveDecompNet provides satisfactory
performance down to signal-to noise-ratio (SNR) of 0.1. The potential of
the method is 1) to improve broadband SNR of transient (earthquake)
waveforms and 2) to improve local ambient noise to monitor the Earth
structure using ambient noise signals. To test this, we apply a
short-time-average to a long-time-average (STA/LTA) filter and improve
the detection 27 times. We also measure single-station cross-correlation
and autocorrelations of the recovered ambient noise and establish their
improved coherence through time and over different frequency bands. We
conclude that WaveDecompNet is a promising tool for a range of
seismological research.