Comment on "Power-Law Time Distribution of Large Earthquakes"

Agnes Helmstetter, & Didier Sornette

Published March 2004, SCEC Contribution #740

Mega et al.(cond-mat/0212529) proposed to use the “diffusion entropy” (DE) method to demonstrate that the distribution of time intervals between a large earthquake (the mainshock of a given seismic sequence) and the next one does not obey Poisson statistics. We have performed synthetic tests which show that the DE is unable to detect correlations between clusters, thus negating the claimed possibility of detecting an intercluster correlation. We also show that the LR model, proposed by Mega et al. to reproduce inter-cluster correlation, is insufficient to account for the correlation observed in the data.

Citation
Helmstetter, A., & Sornette, D. (2004). Comment on "Power-Law Time Distribution of Large Earthquakes". Physical Review Letters, 92(12), 129801.1. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.92.129801.