Increased earthquake rate prior to mainshocks

Eitan E. Asher, Shlomo Havlin, Shay Moshel and Yosef Ashkenazy

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 2023, vol. 177, issue C

Abstract: According to the Omori-Utsu law, the rate of aftershocks after a mainshock decays as a power law with an exponent close to 1. This well-established law was intensively used in the past to study and model the statistical properties of earthquakes. Moreover, according to the so-called inverse Omori law, the rate of earthquakes should also increase prior to a mainshock—this law has received much less attention due to its large uncertainty. Here, we mainly study the inverse Omori law based on a highly detailed Southern California earthquake catalog, which is complete for magnitudes mc≥1 or even lower. First, we develop a technique to identify mainshocks, foreshocks, and aftershocks. We then find, based on a statistical procedure we developed, that the rate of earthquakes is higher a few days prior to a mainshock. We find that this increase is much smaller for (a) a catalog with a magnitude threshold of mc=2.5 and (b) for the Epidemic-Type Aftershocks Sequence (ETAS) model catalogs, even when used with a small magnitude threshold (i.e., mc=1). We also analyze the rate of aftershocks after mainshocks and find that the Omori-Utsu law does not hold for many individual mainshocks and that it may be valid only statistically when considering many mainshocks together. Yet, the analysis of the ETAS model based on the Omori-Utsu law exhibits similar behavior as that of the real catalogs, indicating the validity of this law.

Keywords: Earthquakes; Omori-utsu law; Statistics; ETAS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960077923011633
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chsofr:v:177:y:2023:i:c:s0960077923011633

DOI: 10.1016/j.chaos.2023.114261

Access Statistics for this article

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals is currently edited by Stefano Boccaletti and Stelios Bekiros

More articles in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thayer, Thomas R. ().