Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America
HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS
QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced]


     

Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America; April 2005; v. 95; no. 2; p. 684-698; DOI: 10.1785/0120040007
© 2005 Seismological Society of America
This Article
Right arrow Figures Only
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Citation Map
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via HighWire
Right arrow Citing Articles via ISI Web of Science (8)
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Woessner, J.
Right arrow Articles by Wiemer, S.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
GeoRef
Right arrow GeoRef Citation

Assessing the Quality of Earthquake Catalogues: Estimating the Magnitude of Completeness and Its Uncertainty

Jochen Woessner1 and Stefan Wiemer

1 Institute of Geophysics
ETH Hönggerberg
CH-8093
Zürich, Switzerland
jochen.woessner{at}sed.ethz.ch
 (J.W.)

We introduce a new method to determine the magnitude of completeness Mc and its uncertainty. Our method models the entire magnitude range (EMR method) consisting of the self-similar complete part of the frequency-magnitude distribution and the incomplete portion, thus providing a comprehensive seismicity model. We compare the EMR method with three existing techniques, finding that EMR shows a superior performance when applied to synthetic test cases or real data from regional and global earthquake catalogues. This method, however, is also the most computationally intensive. Accurate knowledge of Mc is essential for many seismicity-based studies, and particularly for mapping out seismicity parameters such as the b-value of the Gutenberg-Richter relationship. By explicitly computing the uncertainties in Mc using a bootstrap approach, we show that uncertainties in b-values are larger than traditionally assumed, especially when considering small sample sizes.

As examples, we investigated temporal variations of Mc for the 1992 Landers aftershock sequence and found that it was underestimated on average by 0.2 with former techniques. Mapping Mc on a global scale, Mc reveals considerable spatial variations for the Harvard Centroid Moment Tensor (CMT) (5.3 ≤ Mc ≤ 6.0) and the International Seismological Centre (ISC) catalogue (4.3 ≤ Mc ≤ 5.0).




This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Bulletin of the Seismological Society of AmericaHome page
D. Schorlemmer and J. Woessner
Probability of Detecting an Earthquake
Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, October 1, 2008; 98(5): 2103 - 2117.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Home page
 Bulletin of the Seismological Society of AmericaHome page
A. Christophersen and E. G. C. Smith
Foreshock Rates from Aftershock Abundance
Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, October 1, 2008; 98(5): 2133 - 2148.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Home page
 Bulletin of the Seismological Society of AmericaHome page
D. Amorese
Applying a Change-Point Detection Method on Frequency-Magnitude Distributions
Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, October 1, 2007; 97(5): 1742 - 1749.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Home page
 Seismological Research LettersHome page
S. Wiemer and D. Schorlemmer
ALM: An Asperity-based Likelihood Model for California
Seismological Research Letters, January 1, 2007; 78(1): 134 - 140.
[Full Text] [PDF]


HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS
Copyright © 2005 by the Seismological Society of America.