Rapid source characterization of the Maule earthquake using Prompt
Elasto-Gravity Signals
Abstract
The recently identified Prompt Elasto-Gravity Signals (PEGS), generated
by large earthquakes, propagate at the speed of light and are sensitive
to the earthquake magnitude and focal mechanism. These characteristics
make PEGS potentially very advantageous for earthquake and tsunami early
warning. PEGS-based early warning does not suffer from the saturation of
magnitude estimations problem that P-wave based early warning algorithms
have, and could be faster than Global Navigation Satellite Systems
(GNSS)-based systems while not requiring a priori assumptions on slip
distribution. We use a deep learning model called PEGSNet to track the
temporal evolution of the magnitude of the 2010
$\textrm{M}_{\textrm{w}}$ 8.8
Maule, Chile earthquake. The model is a Convolutional Neural Network
(CNN) trained on a database of synthetic PEGS – simulated for an
exhaustive set of possible earthquakes distributed along the Chilean
subduction zone – augmented with empirical noise. The approach is
multi-station and leverages the information recorded by the seismic
network to estimate as fast as possible the magnitude and location of an
ongoing earthquake. Our results indicate that PEGSNet could have
estimated that the magnitude of the Maule earthquake was above 8.7, 90
seconds after origin time. Our offline simulations using real data and
noise recordings further support the instantaneous tracking of the
source time function of the earthquake and show that deploying seismic
stations in optimal locations could improve the performance of the
algorithm.