PhaseLink: A Deep Learning Approach to Seismic Phase Association

Abstract

Seismic phase association is a fundamental task in seismology that pertains to linking together phase detections on different sensors that originate from a common earthquake. It is widely employed to detect earthquakes on permanent and temporary seismic networks and underlies most seismicity catalogs produced around the world. This task can be challenging because the number of sources is unknown, events frequently overlap in time, or can occur simultaneously in different parts of a network. We present PhaseLink, a framework based on recent advances in deep learning for grid‐free earthquake phase association. Our approach learns to link phases together that share a common origin and is trained entirely on millions of synthetic sequences of P and S wave arrival times generated using a 1‐D velocity model. Our approach is simple to implement for any tectonic regime, suitable for real‐time processing, and can naturally incorporate errors in arrival time picks. Rather than tuning a set of ad hoc hyperparameters to improve performance, PhaseLink can be improved by simply adding examples of problematic cases to the training data set. We demonstrate the state‐of‐the‐art performance of PhaseLink on a challenging sequence from southern California and synthesized sequences from Japan designed to test the point at which the method fails. For the examined data sets, PhaseLink can precisely associate phases to events that occur only ∼12 s apart in origin time. This approach is expected to improve the resolution of seismicity catalogs, add stability to real‐time seismic monitoring, and streamline automated processing of large seismic data sets.