Early warning for great earthquakes from characterization of crustal deformation patterns with deep learning

Jiun-Ting Lin , Diego Melgar , Amanda Thomas, Jake Searcy

Although infrequent, large (Mw7.5+) earthquakes can be extremely damaging and occur on subduction and intraplate faults worldwide. Earthquake early warning (EEW) systems aim to provide advanced warning before strong shaking and tsunami onsets. These systems estimate earthquake magnitude using the early metrics of waveforms, relying on empirical scaling relationships of abundant past events. However, both the rarity and complexity of great events make it challenging to characterize them, and EEW algorithms often underpredict magnitude and the resulting hazards. Here we propose a model, M-LARGE, that leverages the power of deep learning to characterize crustal deformation patterns of large earthquakes in real time. We demonstrate the algorithm in the Chilean Subduction Zone by training it with more than six million different simulated rupture scenarios recorded on the Chilean GNSS network. M-LARGE successfully performs reliable magnitude estimation on the testing dataset with an accuracy of 99%. Furthermore, the model successfully predicts the magnitude of five real Chilean earthquakes that occurred in the last 11 years. These events were damaging, large enough to be recorded by the modern HR-GNSS instrument in the last decade, and provide valuable ground truth. M-LARGE tracks the evolution of the source process and can make faster and more accurate magnitude estimation, significantly outperforming other similar EEW algorithms.