Improving stress-based forecasts

Margarita Segou

Published August 2, 2020, SCEC Contribution #10232, 2020 SCEC Annual Meeting Talk on TBD

This talk discusses an ongoing project aiming to improve our understanding of triggering mechanisms within earthquake sequences by developing and testing physics-based forecast models. The last 30 years stress changes, often coupled with continuum mechanics, is our vehicle for describing the complex physical laws governing earthquake cascades. In this project, we are developing models tracking the space-time evolution of the Central Apennines 2016-2017 (CA16) sequence based on real-time and high-resolution catalogs. The results suggest that a combination of critical elements, such as source and fault characterization together with optimized parametrization, leads to improved model performance. The small scale heterogeneity around large scale faults built on past ruptures allows us to go beyond standard receiver fault implementations. However, as earthquake catalogs improve we now observe some localized inter-sequence aftershock variability suggesting that real-time receiver plane updates are necessary to sustain a good model performance. The new CA16 forecasts are motivated by the 2010 El Mayor-Cucapah sequence findings and recently inspired the 2019 Ridgecrest forecast model development. The continuous testing of hypothesis-driven forecasts based on high-quality earthquake catalogs might offer insights not only to expected aftershock population patterns but also to the preparation of large earthquakes.

Key Words
earthquake triggering; aftershock patterns; physics-based

Citation
Segou, M. (2020, 08). Improving stress-based forecasts. Oral Presentation at 2020 SCEC Annual Meeting.

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