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Abstract Accurate and (near) real-time earthquake monitoring provides the spatial and temporal behaviors of earthquakes for understanding the nature of earthquakes, and also helps in regional seismic hazard assessments and mitigations. Because of the increase in both the quality and quantity of seismic data, an automated earthquake monitoring system is needed. Most of the traditional methods for detecting earthquake signals and picking phases are based on analyses of features in recordings of an individual earthquake and/or their differences from background noises. When seismicity is high, the seismograms are complicated, and, therefore, traditional analysis methods often fail. With the development of machine learning algorithms, earthquake signal detection and seismic phase picking can be more accurate using the features obtained from a large amount of earthquake recordings. We have developed an attention recurrent residual U-Net algorithm, and used data augmentation techniques to improve the accuracy of earthquake detection and seismic phase picking on complex seismograms that record multiple earthquakes. The use of probability functions of P and S arrivals and potential P and S arrival pairs of earthquakes can increase the computational efficiency and accuracy of backprojection for earthquake monitoring in large areas. We applied our workflow to monitor the earthquake activity in southern California during the 2019 Ridgecrest sequence. The distribution of earthquakes determined by our method is consistent with that in the Southern California Earthquake Data Center (SCEDC) catalog. In addition, the number of earthquakes in our catalog is more than three times that of the SCEDC catalog. Our method identifies additional earthquakes that are close in origin times and/or locations, and are not included in the SCEDC catalog. Our algorithm avoids misidentification of seismic phases for earthquake location. In general, our algorithm can provide reliable earthquake monitoring on a large area, even during a high seismicity period. 

Abstract Seismograms are convolution results between seismic sources and the media that seismic waves propagate through, and, therefore, the primary observations for studying seismic source parameters and the Earth interior. The routine earthquake location and travel-time tomography rely on accurate seismic phase picks (e.g., P and S arrivals). As data increase, reliable automated seismic phase-picking methods are needed to analyze data and provide timely earthquake information. However, most traditional autopickers suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio and usually require additional efforts to tune hyperparameters for each case. In this study, we proposed a deep-learning approach that adapted soft attention gates (AGs) and recurrent-residual convolution units (RRCUs) into the backbone U-Net for seismic phase picking. The attention mechanism was implemented to suppress responses from waveforms irrelevant to seismic phases, and the cooperating RRCUs further enhanced temporal connections of seismograms at multiple scales. We used numerous earthquake recordings in Taiwan with diverse focal mechanisms, wide depth, and magnitude distributions, to train and test our model. Setting the picking errors within 0.1 s and predicted probability over 0.5, the AG with recurrent-residual convolution unit (ARRU) phase picker achieved the F1 score of 98.62% for P arrivals and 95.16% for S arrivals, and picking rates were 96.72% for P waves and 90.07% for S waves. The ARRU phase picker also shown a great generalization capability, when handling unseen data. When applied the model trained with Taiwan data to the southern California data, the ARRU phase picker shown no cognitive downgrade. Comparing with manual picks, the arrival times determined by the ARRU phase picker shown a higher consistency, which had been evaluated by a set of repeating earthquakes. The arrival picks with less human error could benefit studies, such as earthquake location and seismic tomography.