Automatic classification of volcanic earthquakes using multi-station waveforms and dynamic neural networks

Abstract

Earthquakes and seismicity have long been used to monitor volcanoes. In addition to the time, location, and magnitude of an earthquake, the characteristics of the waveform itself are important. For example, low-frequency or hybrid type events could be generated by magma rising toward the surface. A rockfall event could indicate a growing lava dome. Classification of earthquake waveforms is thus a useful tool in volcano monitoring. A procedure to perform such classification automatically could flag certain event types immediately, instead of waiting for a human analyst's review. Inspired by speech recognition techniques, we have developed a procedure to classify earthquake waveforms using artificial neural networks. A neural network can be "trained" with an existing set of input and desired output data; in this case, we use a set of earthquake waveforms (input) that has been classified by a human analyst (desired output). After training the neural network, new sets of waveforms can be classified automatically as they are presented. Our procedure uses waveforms from multiple stations, making it robust to seismic network changes and outages. The use of a dynamic time-delay neural network allows waveforms to be presented without precise alignment in time, and thus could be applied to continuous data or to seismic events without clear start and end times. We have evaluated several different training algorithms and neural network structures to determine their effects on classification performance. We apply this procedure to earthquakes recorded at Mount Spurr and Katmai in Alaska, and Uturuncu Volcano in Bolivia. The procedure can successfully distinguish between slab and volcanic events at Uturuncu, between events from four different volcanoes in the Katmai region, and between volcano-tectonic and long-period events at Spurr. Average recall and overall accuracy were greater than 80% in all three cases.