Short Term and Short Range Seismicity Patterns in Different Seismic Areas of the World

The aim of this work is to quantitatively set up a simple hypothesis for occurrence of earthquakes conditioned by prior events, on the basis of a previously existing model and the use of recent instrumental observations. A simple procedure is presented in order to determine the conditional probability of pairs of events (foreshock-mainshock, mainshock-aftershock) with short time and space separation. The first event of a pair should not be an aftershock, i.e., it must not be related to a stronger previous event. The Italian earthquake catalog of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica (ING) (1975–1995, M ≥ 3.4), the earthquake catalog of the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) (1983–1994, M ≥ 3.0) and that of the National Observatory of Athens (NOA) (1982–1994, M ≥ 3.8) were analyzed. The number of observed pairs depends on several parameters: the size of the space-time quiescence volume defining nonaftershocks, the inter event time, the minimum magnitude of the two events, and the spatial dimension of the alarm volume after the first event. The Akaike information criterion has been adopted to assess the optimum set of space-time parameters used in the definition of the pairs, assuming that the occurrence rate of subsequent events may be modeled by two Poisson processes with different rates: the higher rate refers to the space-time volume defined by the alarms and the lower one simulates earthquakes that occur in the nonalarm space-time volume. On the basis of the tests carried out on the seismic catalog of Italy, the occurrence rate of M ≥ 3.8 earthquakes followed by a M ≥ 3.8 mainshock within 10 km and 10 days (validity) is 0.459. We have observed, for all three catalogs, that the occurrence rate density λ for the second event of a couple (mainshock or aftershock) of magnitude M 2 subsequent to a nonaftershock of magnitude M 1 in the time range T can be modeled by the following relationship: λ (T, M 2 )=10 a′ + b(M1 - M2) with b varying from 0.74 (Japan) to 1.09 (Greece). The decrease of the occurrence rate in time for a mainshock after a foreshock or for large aftershocks after a mainshock, for all three databases, obeys the Omori's law with p changing from 0.94 (Italy) to 2.0 (Greece). Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1999