DRRGlobal: Uncovering the weak phases from global seismograms using the damped rank-reduction method

Abstract

Some target seismic signals in the earthquake data can be very weak compared with interfering phases, and are thus difficult to detect, which further hinders the effective usage of these weak phases for subsequent high-resolution imaging of earth interiors. The strong ambient noise makes this situation even more troublesome since the weak signals can be mostly buried in the noise. Here, we present an open-source package for uncovering the weak phases from global seismograms. We adopt a two-step scheme to reconstruct and denoise array data. The first step is weighted average interpolation which puts the data into irregular grids. The second step adopts the weighted projection-onto-convex sets based on damped rank-reduction to further interpolate and denoise for the binned data. Taking the complexity of the weak signal into consideration, we adopt the automatic strategy to select an appropriate rank in different localized windows. We conduct several synthetic tests to carefully investigate the performance regarding effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency, and compare the algorithm with the frequency–wavenumber-domain projection onto convex sets method that is already used in the global seismology literature. Finally, the proposed framework is validated via a recorded array data set of the 1995 May 5 Philippines earthquake.