Aftershock Decay Rates in the Iranian Plateau

Abstract

Motivated by the desire to have more information following the occurrence of damaging events, the main purpose of this article is to study aftershock sequence parameters in the Iranian plateau. To this end, the catalogue of the Iranian earthquakes between 2002 to the end of 2013 has been collected and homogenized among which 15 earthquakes have been selected to study their aftershock decay rates. For different tectonic provinces, the completeness magnitudes (Mc) of the earthquake catalogue have been calculated in different time intervals. Also, the Mc variability in spatial and temporal windows has been determined for each selected event. For major Iranian earthquakes, catalogue of aftershocks has been collected thanks to three declustering methods: first, the classical windowing method of Gardner and Knopoff (Bull Seismol Soc Am 64:1363–1367, 1974); second, a modified version of this using spatial windowing based on the Wells and Coppersmith (Bull Seismol Soc Am 84:974–1002, 1994) relations; and third, the Burkhard and Grunthal (Swiss J Geosci 102:149–188, 2009) scheme. Effects of the temporal windows also have been investigated using the time periods of 1 month, 100 days, and 1 year in the declustering method of Gardner and Knopoff (Bull Seismol Soc Am 64:1363–1367, 1974). In the next step, the modified Omori law coefficients have been calculated for the 15 selected earthquakes. The calibrated regional generic model describing the temporal and magnitude distribution of aftershocks is of interest for time-dependent seismic hazard forecasts. The regional characteristics of the aftershock decay rates have been studied for the selected Iranian earthquakes in the Alborz, Zagros and Central Iran regions considering their different seismotectonics regimes. However, due to the lack of sufficient data, no results have been reported for the Kopeh-Dagh and Makran seismotectonic regions.