A new procedure to best-fit earthquake magnitude probability distributions: including an example for Taiwan

J. Wang (), Yih-Min Wu (), Duruo Huang () and Su-Chin Chang ()

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2014, vol. 71, issue 1, 837-850

Abstract: Since the year 1973, more than 54,000 M w ≥ 3.0 earthquakes have occurred around Taiwan, and their magnitude–frequency relationship was found following with the Gutenberg–Richter recurrence law with b value equal to 0.923 from the least-square calculation. However, using this b value with the McGuire–Arabasz algorithm results in some disagreement between observations and expectations in magnitude probability. This study introduces a simple approach to optimize the b value for better modeling of the magnitude probability, and its effectiveness is demonstrated in this paper. The result shows that the optimal b value can better model the observed magnitude distribution, compared with two customary methods. For example, given magnitude threshold = 5.0 and maximum magnitude = 8.0, the optimal b value of 0.835 is better than 0.923 from the least-square calculation and 0.913 from maximum likelihood estimation for simulating the earthquake’s magnitude probability distribution around Taiwan. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Keywords: Earthquake magnitude probability; b value; Optimization; Taiwan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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DOI: 10.1007/s11069-013-0934-1

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