Detection and Classification of Continuous Volcano-Seismic Signals With Recurrent Neural Networks

Abstract

This paper introduces recurrent neural networks (RNN), long short-term memory (LSTM), and gated recurrent unit (GRU) to detect and classify continuous sequences of volcano-seismic events at the Deception Island Volcano, Antarctica. A representative data set containing volcano-tectonic earthquakes, long-period events, volcanic tremors, and hybrid events was used to train these models. Experimental results show that RNN, LSTM, and GRU can exploit temporal and frequency information from continuous seismic data, attaining close to 90%, 94%, and 92% events correctly detected and classified. A second experiment is presented in this paper. The architectures described above, trained with data from campaigns of seismic records obtained in 1995–2002, have been tested with data from the recent seismic survey performed at the Deception Island Volcano in 2016–2017 by the Spanish Antarctic scientific campaign. Despite the variations in the geophysical properties of the seismic events within the volcano across eruptive periods, results provide good generalization accuracy. This result expands the possibilities of RNNs for real-time monitoring of volcanic activity, even if seismic sources change over time.