AutoBETA: Fully Automated Earthquake Catalog Replenishment Tool

Abstract Incomplete earthquake catalogs, especially for early aftershocks, pose challenges for accurate seismological analysis. This study introduces Auto-Biscale Empirical Transformation Application (AutoBETA), a fully automated earthquake data replenishment tool that builds upon previous semiautomated approaches by integrating grid-based density analysis with flexible missing region identification. This tool also supports user-defined polygons and hybrid strategies (union or intersection) to incorporate expert knowledge. We applied AutoBETA to one synthetic incomplete catalog and four real-earthquake catalogs: the 2008 Mw 7.9 Wenchuan, 2024 Mw 7.5 Noto, 2010 M 5.26 Baja California, and 2016 M 6.06 Norcia sequences. The analyses were conducted using magnitude thresholds of M ≥ 3.0, M ≥ 2.0, M ≥ 1.0, and M ≥ 2.0. After 100 fully automated iterations, the method replenished 43.9%, 40.0%, 40.5%, and 44.8% of the final catalogs. These results substantially improve catalog completeness, enabling more robust aftershock modeling and statistical analysis. AutoBETA is implemented in Python and is available as open-source software on GitHub.