Volcanic tremor extraction and earthquake detection using music information retrieval algorithms

• Published in: Seismological Research Letters
• Main Authors: Zali, Zahra (Dr.), Ohrnberger, Matthias (Dr. rer. nat.), Scherbaum, Frank (Prof. Dr.), Cotton, Fabrice (Prof. Dr.), Eibl, Eva P. S. (Prof. Dr.)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: ddc:550; Institut für Geowissenschaften; Holuhraun; Iceland
• Online Access: https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/61701; https://doi.org/10.1785/0220210016

Volcanic tremor signals are usually observed before or during volcanic eruptions and must be monitored to evaluate the volcanic activity. A challenge in studying seismic signals of volcanic origin is the coexistence of transient signal swarms and long-lasting volcanic tremor signals. Separating transient events from volcanic tremors can, therefore, contrib-ute to improving upon our understanding of the underlying physical processes. Exploiting the idea of harmonic-percussive separation in musical signal processing, we develop a method to extract the harmonic volcanic tremor signals and to detect tran-sient events from seismic recordings. Based on the similarity properties of spectrogram frames in the time-frequency domain, we decompose the signal into two separate spec-trograms representing repeating (harmonic) and nonrepeating (transient) patterns, which correspond to volcanic tremor signals and earthquake signals, respectively. We reconstruct the harmonic tremor signal in the time domain from the complex spectrogram of the repeating pattern by only considering the phase components for the frequency range in which the tremor amplitude spectrum is significantly contribut-ing to the energy of the signal. The reconstructed signal is, therefore, clean tremor signal without transient events. Furthermore, we derive a characteristic function suitable for the detection of tran-sient events (e.g., earthquakes) by integrating amplitudes of the nonrepeating spectro-gram over frequency at each time frame. Considering transient events like earthquakes, 78% of the events are detected for signal-to-noise ratio = 0.1 in our semisynthetic tests. In addition, we compared the number of detected earthquakes using our method for one month of continuous data recorded during the Holuhraun 2014-2015 eruption in Iceland with the bulletin presented in Agustsdottir et al. (2019). Our single station event detection algorithm identified 84% of the bulletin events. Moreover, we detected a total of 12,619 events, which is more than twice the ...