Earthquake Declustering via a Nearest-Neighbor Approach

Ilya Zaliapin, & Yehuda Ben-Zion

Published August 13, 2016, SCEC Contribution #6740, 2016 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #310

We propose a new method for earthquake declustering based on nearest-neighbor analysis of earthquakes in space-time-magnitude domain. The nearest-neighbor approach was recently applied to a variety of seismological problems that validate the general utility of the technique and reveal the existence of several different robust types of earthquake clusters. Notably, it was demonstrated that clustering associated with the largest earthquakes is statistically different from that of small-to-medium events. In particular, the characteristic bimodality of the nearest-neighbor distances that helps separating clustered and background events is often violated after the largest earthquakes in their vicinity, which is dominated by triggered events. This prevents using a simple threshold between the two modes of the nearest-neighbor distance distribution for declustering. The current study resolves this problem hence extending the nearest-neighbor approach to the problem of earthquake declustering. The proposed technique is applied to seismicity of different areas in California (San Jacinto, Coso, Salton Sea, Parkfield, Ventura, Mojave, etc.), as well as to the global seismicity, to demonstrate its stability and efficiency in treating various clustering types. The results are compared with those of alternative declustering methods.

Key Words
earthquake declustering

Citation
Zaliapin, I., & Ben-Zion, Y. (2016, 08). Earthquake Declustering via a Nearest-Neighbor Approach. Poster Presentation at 2016 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Earthquake Forecasting and Predictability (EFP)