Name
Deep Learning Approaches for Earthquake Depth Determination: From Single-Station to Multi-Station
Date & Time
Monday, May 25, 2026, 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Description
Accurate earthquake source-depth determination is critical for understanding tectonic processes and assessing seismic hazards. However, traditional travel-time-based location methods struggle to constrain depths due to imperfect station distribution and the strong trade-off between source depth and origin time. Deep learning holds great potential for extracting depth-related information directly from waveforms.
We developed VGGDepth, a deep learning framework for earthquake depth determination. The architecture uses convolutional layers for feature extraction followed by fully connected layers that map waveform features to Gaussian-distributed depth predictions. We implemented two approaches: (1) a single-station model using three-component waveforms, validated on the 2016-2017 Central Apennines, Italy, and (2) a regional multi-station model for Southern California, processing four-channel inputs from multiple stations (three-component waveforms plus epicentral distance). The multi-station model, trained on over 300,000 earthquakes (2010-2024) with 10+ million samples, achieves mean absolute errors within 0.3 km across the 0-25 km depth range with a >99% recall rate. Both approaches demonstrate strong performance and generalizability, offering fast and accurate depth relocation capabilities for real-time applications and historical earthquake reassessment.
Location Name
McInnes Room
Full Address
Dalhousie University
Halifax NS
Canada
Halifax NS
Canada
Session Type
Poster
Abstract ID
326
Speaker Organization
Dalhousie
Session Name
S-4
Co-authors
Miao Zhang
Presenting Author
Wenda Li Dalhousie University