Extreme Earthquake and Earthquake Perceptibility Study in Greece and its Surrounding Area

Paul Burton (), Changyuan Qin (), G.-Akis Tselentis () and Ethimios Sokos ()

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2004, vol. 32, issue 3, 277-312

Abstract: The sample interval for the selection of extreme magnitudes plays an important part in the quality of Gumbel model fitting. A short sample interval can produce many observations, which is helpful in obtaining a reliably fitting model. However a short sample interval can bring many dummy ``observations'', a condition which adversely biases the fitting. The short sample interval also increases the chance to introduce non-independent observations as well, which violates a basic requirement of the Gumbel model. On the other hand, a large time interval not only reduces the number of observations, but also enlarges the observation error. Thus, for Greece, the most suitable parameters of the third Gumbel extreme model are obtained by using a sample interval which produces minimum error. In consideration of the reliability of the seismic data, earthquakes with magnitude M ≥ 5.5 in Greece and its surrounding region after 1900 are used mainly in the present paper. In order to obtain well resolved contour maps with smooth changes a 2°× 2° cell with half-degree overlap strategy was used to scan the region. The most expected largest earthquake for the next fifty, one hundred and two hundred years are estimated for each cell. Likewise, the events with magnitude at a probability of 90\% of non-exceedance over the next fifty, one hundred and two hundred years are estimated for each cell. In parallel to this procedure we also analyze the 67 shallow seismic zones outlined by Papazachos and his colleagues and detail individual zone results where these are obtained. The most perceptible earthquake magnitude for the range of intensities I={VI}, VII and VIII are also calculated. All results show that the areas around the Hellenic Arc and the Cephalonia Transform Fault for Greece have comparatively high frequency of destructive earthquakes accompanied by a high occurrence probability of moderate earthquakes (M ≥ 5.5). Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2004

Keywords: Gumbel model; earthquake; extreme value; perceptibility; Greece (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/B:NHAZ.0000035545.89097.0d (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:nathaz:v:32:y:2004:i:3:p:277-312

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1023/B:NHAZ.0000035545.89097.0d

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().