A Deep-Learning Phase Picker with Calibrated Bayesian-Derived Uncertainties for Earthquakes in the Yellowstone Volcanic Region

ABSTRACT Traditional seismic phase pickers perform poorly during periods of elevated seismicity due to inherent weakness when detecting overlapping earthquake waveforms. This weakness results in incomplete seismic catalogs, particularly deficient in earthquakes that are close in space and time. Supervised deep-learning (DL) pickers allow for improved detection performance and better handle the overlapping waveforms. Here, we present a DL phase-picking procedure specifically trained on Yellowstone seismicity and designed to fit within the University of Utah Seismograph Stations (UUSS) real-time system. We modify and combine existing DL models to label the seismic phases in continuous data and produce better phase arrival times. We use transfer learning to achieve consistency with UUSS analysts while maintaining robust models. To improve the performance during periods of enhanced seismicity, we develop a data augmentation strategy to synthesize waveforms with two nearly coincident P arrivals. We also incorporate a model uncertainty quantification method, Multiple Stochastic Weight Averaging-Gaussian (MultiSWAG), for arrival-time estimates and compare it to dropout—a more standard approach. We use an efficient, model-agnostic method of empirically calibrating the uncertainties to produce meaningful 90% credible intervals. The credible intervals are used downstream in association, location, and quality assessment. For an in-depth evaluation of our automated method, we apply it to continuous data recorded from 25 March to 3 April 2014, on 20 three-component stations and 14 vertical-component stations. This 10-day period contains an Mw 4.8 event, the largest earthquake in the Yellowstone region since 1980. A seismic analyst manually examined more than 1000 located events, including ∼855 previously unidentified, and concluded that only two were incorrect. Finally, we present an analyst-created, high-resolution arrival-time data set, including 651 new arrival times, for one hour of data from station WY.YNR for robust evaluation of missed detections before association. Our method identified 60% of the analyst P picks and 81% of the S picks.