Event-Centric Earthquake Monitoring with a Multi-Station Transformer

Abstract

Earthquake catalogs underpin studies such as fault structure, earthquake processes and seismic hazard, and their value depends on being both complete and reliable. Machine learning has improved individual tasks of earthquake monitoring, but processing stations independently discards the consistency of arrivals across the network, and running tasks in sequence fragments the information describing each earthquake. We present EQNet2, a geometry-aware multi-station Transformer that jointly predicts phase arrivals, first-motion polarities, source location and magnitude, and the association of arrivals into events. On a Northern California test dataset and on continuous waveforms from Ridgecrest and the San Francisco Bay Area, EQNet2 recovers more weak arrivals, produces fewer false detections, and associates more picks into located events. Its learned attention links information across stations along time--distance patterns consistent with seismic moveout. As seismic networks grow denser, exploiting multi-station coherence and event-centric prediction offers a path to more complete and reliable catalogs.