Toward earthquake early warning: A convolutional neural network for rapid earthquake magnitude estimation

Abstract

Earthquake early warning (EEW) is one of the important tools to reduce the hazard of earthquakes. In contemporary seismology, EEW is typically transformed into a fast classification of earthquake magnitude, i.e., large magnitude earthquakes that require warning are in the positive category and vice versa in the negative category. However, the current standard information signal processing routines for magnitude fast classification are time-consuming and vulnerable to data imbalance. Therefore, in this study, Deep Learning (DL) algorithms are introduced to assist with EEW. For the three-component seismic waveform record of 7 s obtained from the China Earthquake Network Center (CENC), this paper proposes a DL model (EEWMagNet), which accomplishes the extraction of spatial and temporal features through DenseBlock with Bottleneck and Multi-Head Attention. Extensive experiments on Chinese field data demonstrate that the proposed model performs well in the fast classification of magnitude. Moreover, the comparison experiments demonstrate that the epicenter distance information is indispensable, and the normalization has a negative effect on the model to capture accurate amplitude information.

Keywords

• Massive tectonic earthquakes
• Earthquake early warning
• Magnitude classification
• DenseBlock
• Multi-head attention