Synthetic ground motions in heterogeneous geologies: the HEMEW-3D dataset for scientific machine learning

Abstract

Abstract. The ever-improving performances of physics-based simulations and the rapid developments of deep learning are offering new perspectives to study earthquake-induced ground motion. Due to the large amount of data required to train deep neural networks, applications have so far been limited to recorded data or two-dimensional simulations. To bridge the gap between deep learning and high-fidelity numerical simulations, this work introduces a new database of physics-based earthquake simulations. The HEMEW-3D database comprises 30,000 simulations of elastic wave propagation in three-dimensional (3D) geological domains. Each domain is parametrized by a different geological model built from a random arrangement of layers augmented by random fields that represent heterogeneities. For each simulation, ground motion is synthetized at the surface by a grid of virtual sensors. The high frequency of waveforms (fmax = 5 Hz) allows extensive analyses of surface ground motion. Existing and foreseen applications range from statistic analyses of the ground motion variability and machine learning methods on geological models, to deep learning-based predictions of ground motion depending on 3D heterogeneous geologies.