Estimation of arrival times from seismic waves: a manifold-based approach*

Abstract

We propose a new method to analyse seismic time-series and estimate the arrival times of seismic waves. Our approach combines two ingredients: the time-series are first lifted into a high-dimensional space using time-delay embedding; the resulting phase space is then parametrized using a non-linear method based on the eigenvectors of the graph Laplacian. We validate our approach using a data set of seismic events that occurred in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Utah between 2005 and 2006. Our approach outperforms methods based on singular-spectrum analysis, wavelet analysis and short-term average/long-term average (STA/LTA).