Nowcasting Earthquakes with QuakeGPT: Methods and First Results

TL;DR

This paper introduces QuakeGPT, an AI-based deep learning model using attention transformers trained on earthquake simulations to improve earthquake nowcasting, and presents initial results demonstrating its potential.

Contribution

It develops a novel earthquake nowcasting method using a science transformer trained on simulated earthquake data, addressing limited real data for effective modeling.

Findings

Transformer trained on ERAS simulations shows promise in nowcasting.

Method demonstrates applicability to observed earthquake catalogs.

Initial results suggest improved earthquake potential assessment.

Abstract

Earthquake nowcasting has been proposed as a means of tracking the change in large earthquake potential in a seismically active area. The method was developed using observable seismic data, in which probabilities of future large earthquakes can be computed using Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) methods. Furthermore, analysis of the Shannon information content of the earthquake catalogs has been used to show that there is information contained in the catalogs, and that it can vary in time. Here we discuss a new method for earthquake nowcasting that uses an AI-enhanced deep learning model "QuakeGPT" that is based on an attention-based science transformer adapted for time series forecasting. Such dot product attention-based transformers were introduced by Vaswani et al. (2017), and are the basis for the new large language models such as ChatGPT. To use these science transformers, they must first be trained on a large corpus of data. A problem is that the existing history of reliable earthquake catalog data extends back in time only a few decades, which is almost certainly too short to train a model for reliable nowcasting/forecasting. As a result, we turn to earthquake simulations to train the transformer model. Specifically we discuss a simple stochastic earthquake simulation model "ERAS" that has recently been introduced. The ERAS model is similar to the more common "ETAS" models, the difference being that the ERAS model has only 2 novel, adjustable parameters, rather than the 6-8 adjustable parameters that characterize most ETAS models. Using this ERAS model, we then define a transformer model and train it using a long catalog of ERAS simulations, then apply it to an ERAS validation dataset with the transformer model. In this paper, we describe this new method and assess the applicability to observed earthquake catalogs for use in nowcasting/forecasting.