Abstract
AbstractDetermining the aperiodicity of large earthquake recurrences is key to forecast future rupture behavior. Aperiodicity is classically expressed as the coefficient of variation of recurrence intervals, though the recent trend to express it as burstiness is more intuitive and avoids minor inaccuracies. Due to the underestimation of burstiness in records with a low number of recurrence intervals, the paradigm is to obtain long paleoseismic records with many events. Here, we present a suite of synthetic paleoseismic records designed around the Weibull and inverse Gaussian distributions that demonstrate that age uncertainty relative to the mean recurrence interval causes overestimation of burstiness. The effects of overestimation and underestimation interact and give complex results for accurate estimates of aperiodicity. Furthermore, we show that the way recurrence intervals are sampled from a paleoseismic record can have strong influences on the resulting statistic and its implication for probabilistic seismic hazard assessment. Comparing values of burstiness between paleoseismic records should therefore be done with caution.
Highlights
The ultimate goal of paleoseismology is to estimate the magnitude, location, and timing of future earthquakes by reconstructing past earthquakes over multi-millennia timescales
We present a suite of synthetic paleoseismic records designed around the Weibull and inverse Gaussian distributions that demonstrate that age uncertainty relative to the mean recurrence interval causes overestimation of burstiness
It is worth noting that the underestimation of the coefficient of variation (CoV) and B for low n is described here for the mean and median
Summary
The ultimate goal of paleoseismology is to estimate the magnitude, location, and timing of future earthquakes by reconstructing past earthquakes over multi-millennia timescales. Besides constraining the mean recurrence rate, paleoseismologists characterize the aperiodicity in earthquake sequences (e.g., Goes & Ward, 1994). Aperiodicity plays a key role in characterizing the main conceptual models of seismic behavior in major tectonic fault zones, being the elastic rebound theory (for periodic behavior, Reid, 1910), characteristic earthquakes (for weakly periodic behavior, Schwartz & Coppersmith, 1984), earthquakes as a Poissonian process with constant hazard rates (for random recurrences, e.g., Gomez et al, 2015) and earthquake supercycles (Sieh et al, 2008). The aperiodicity is expressed by the coefficient of variation (CoV ; mean-normalized standard deviation) of recurrence intervals (RIs), that is, the time between two consecutive events. B is the result of a one-to-one transformation of the CoV from the domain of 0 to to B’s codomain of 1 to 1
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