Near Real-Time Earthquake Monitoring in Texas Using the Highly Precise Deep Learning Phase Picker

Artificial intelligence (AI) seismology has witnessed enormous success in a variety of fields, especially in earthquake detection and P and S-wave arrival picking. It has become widely accepted that DL techniques greatly help routine seismic monitoring by enabling more accurate picking than traditional pickers like STA/LTA. However, a completely automatic AI-driven earthquake monitoring framework has not been reported due to the concerns of potential false positives using DL pickers. Here, we propose a novel AI-facilitated near real-time monitoring framework using a recently developed deep learning (DL) picker (EQCCT) that has been deployed in the Texas seismological network (TexNet). For the West Texas area, TexNet's seismic monitoring relies on the EQCCT picker to report earthquake events. For earthquakes with a magnitude above two, the picks are further validated by analysts to output the final TexNet catalog. Due to the fast-increasing seismicity caused by continuing oil&gas production in West Texas, this AI-facilitated framework significantly relieves the workload of TexNet analysts. We show the mean absolute error (MAE) of automatic magnitude estimation for the magnitude-above-two earthquakes is smaller than 0.15 in West Texas and MAEs of hypocenter locations within 2.6 km in both distance and depth estimates. This research provides more evidence that DL pickers can play a fundamental role in daily earthquake monitoring.