The ESD Publications website will be undergoing a major upgrade beginning Friday, October 11th at 5:00 PM PDT. The new upgraded site will be available no later than Monday, October 21st. Please plan to complete any critical activities before or after this time.

Characterizing High Rate GNSS Velocity Noise for Synthesizing a GNSS Strong...

Dittmann, T., and J. Morton (2024), Characterizing High Rate GNSS Velocity Noise for Synthesizing a GNSS Strong Motion Learning Catalog, Seismica, 2, doi:10.26443/seismica.v2i2.978.
Abstract: 

Data-driven approaches to identify geophysical signals have proven beneficial in high dimen-
sional environments where model-driven methods fall short. GNSS offers a source of unsaturated ground
motion observations that are the data currency of ground motion forecasting and rapid seismic hazard as-
sessment and alerting. However, these GNSS-sourced signals are superposed onto hardware-, location- and
time-dependent noise signatures influenced by the Earth’s atmosphere, low-cost or spaceborne oscillators,
and complex radio frequency environments. Eschewing heuristic or physics based models for a data-driven
approach in this context is a step forward in autonomous signal discrimination. However, the performance of
a data-driven approach depends upon substantial representative samples with accurate classifications, and
more complex algorithm architectures for deeper scientific insights compound this need. The existing cat-
alogs of high-rate (≥1Hz) GNSS ground motions are relatively limited. In this work, we model and evaluate
the probabilistic noise of GNSS velocity measurements over a hemispheric network. We generate stochastic
noise time series to augment transferred low-noise strong motion signals from within 70 kilometers of strong
events (≥ MW 5.0) from an existing inertial catalog. We leverage known signal and noise information to as-
sess feature extraction strategies and quantify augmentation benefits. We find a classifier model trained on
this expanded pseudo-synthetic catalog improves generalization compared to a model trained solely on a
real-GNSS velocity catalog, and offers a framework for future enhanced data driven approaches.

PDF of Publication: 
Download from publisher's website.
Research Program: 
Earth Surface & Interior Program (ESI)