Categories of Infrasound Signals at Mount Etna Inferred from
Unsupervised Learning Techniques
Abstract
The frequent activity taking place at Mount Etna may pose risks to
tourists and specialists visiting the summit craters as well as to the
nearby population and thus requires constant monitoring. Infrasound
recordings play an important role in volcanic observation because
shallow explosive activity, shallow tremor processes or other volcanic
phenomena coupled with the atmosphere are easier to identify with sound
waves travelling through the air than with seismic waves, which are more
effective for the characterization of buried sources but are strongly
affected by scattering within the volcano edifice. Similar to seismic
waves, infrasound signals often interfere with noise sources, in case of
Mount Etna mostly wind induced noise. The manual distinction of noisy
data from real volcanic signals is often not easy, and becomes
unrealistic when a large amount of data has to be processed. Currently
five summit craters at Mt Etna are active, showing intermittent and
fluctuating levels of activity. This leads to a wide variety of
infrasound signal patterns coming along with changing noise levels. In
order to distinguish between noise induced signals and different kinds
of volcano induced signals – such as infrasound events and tremor – in
the waveform data we apply unsupervised pattern recognition techniques.
We show that by extracting features from the amplitude spectrum, a
simple clustering analysis with K-Means yields a set of different
activity regimes. A more indepth analysis of the patterns is possible by
means of Self-Organizing maps (SOMs) which also allow for the
identification of transitional activity regimes and provide the option
to color-code the results for an intuitive interpretation. We create a
reference data set from multiple months of infrasound waveforms to
include as many activity regimes as possible. We apply the results to a
test set of data showing how new data can be treated fast and
efficiently.