Norcia 2016 9-Station Seismic Dataset (Foreshock vs Aftershock)

The Norcia 2016 Foreshock–Aftershock 9-Station Dataset consists of seismic events recorded around the Mw 6.5 2016 Norcia earthquake mainshock. The dataset includes both foreshocks and aftershocks associated with the seismic sequence and is designed for foreshock/aftershock classification and seismic cycle analysis. Events were phase-picked using PhaseNet, recorded at nine seismic stations surrounding the Norcia fault zone. Along with waveform data, the dataset includes complete metadata, such as event time, station identifier, class label (foreshock or aftershock)s. This dataset was used in the EGU General Assembly 2026 study “Station-Level and Network-Wide SHAP Explanation of CNN Models for Seismic Cycle Monitoring: Evidence from Norcia 2016”. That work builds on evidence that fault-zone properties evolve during the seismic cycle and that seismic signals recorded before and after a mainshock contain distinguishable signatures. A CNN trained on RGB spectrograms from stations around the Norcia sequence demonstrated strong performance in distinguishing foreshocks from aftershocks. While multi-station models achieved high accuracy (≈97%), SHAP analysis revealed station-dependent variability and a reorganization of feature importance, suggesting that heterogeneous spatial sampling affects interpretability. Station-wise models produced more stable and physically coherent explanations, highlighting the role of propagation effects and motivating region-aware interpretability approaches. The dataset preprocessing pipeline and usage are available in the SeismoXAI repository.