EVIDENCE OF PRECURSORY PATTERNS IN AGGREGATED TIME SERIES

Summary, in English

We investigate temporal changes in seismic activity observed in the West Corinth Gulfand North-West Peloponnese during 2008 to 2010. Two major earthquake sequencestook place in the area at that time (in 2008 and 2010). Our aim is to analyse Greekseismicity to attempt to confirm the existence or non-existence of seismic precursorsprior to the strongest earthquakes. Perhaps because the area is geologically andtectonically complex, we found that it was not possible to fit the data well using aconsistent Epidemic Type Aftershock Sequence (ETAS) model. Nor could weunambiguously identify foreshocks to individual mainshocks. Therefore we soughtpatterns in aggregated foreshock catalogues. We set a magnitude threshold (M3.5)above which all the earthquakes detected in the study area are considered as“mainshocks”, and we combined all data preceding these into a single foreshockcatalogue. This reveals an increase in seismicity rate not robustly observable forindividual cases. The observed effect is significantly greater than that consistent withstochastic models, including ETAS, thus indicating genuine foreshock activity withpotential useful precursory power, if sufficient data is available, i.e. if the magnitudeof completeness is sufficiently low.

• Author: Angeliki Adamaki; Roland G. Roberts
• Publishing year: 2016
• Language: English
• Publication/Series: Bulletin of the Geological Society of Greece : 14th International Conference of the G.S.G.
• Volume: 50
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/bgsg.11834
• Document type: Conference paper
• Topic: Geophysics
• Status: Published