Deep learning for P-wave arrival picking in earthquake early warning

Fast and accurate P-wave arrival picking significantly affects the performance of earthquake early warning(EEW)systems.Automated P-wave picking algorithms used in EEW have encountered problems of falsely picking up noise,missing P-waves and inaccurate P-wave arrival estimation.To address these issues,an automatic algorithm based on the convolution neural network(DPick)was developed,and trained with a moderate number of data sets of 17,717 accelerograms.Compared to the widely used approach of the short-term average/long-term average of signal characteristic function(STA/LTA),DPick is 1.6 times less likely to detect noise as a P-wave,and 76 times less likely to miss P-waves.In terms of estimating P-wave arrival time,when the detection task is completed within 1 s,DPick′s detection occurrence is 7.4 times that of STA/LTA in the 0.05 s error band,and 1.6 times when the error band is 0.10 s.This verified that the proposed method has the potential for wide applications in EEW.