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Practical Suggestions for Assessing Rates of Seismic-Moment Release

¹ Institute for Geophysics
Jackson School of Geosciences
University of Texas at Austin
10100 Burnet Road (R2200)
Austin, Texas 78758-4445

This article explores how to interpret observations of rates of seismic- moment release by evaluating simulated earthquake sequences generated assuming Gutenberg–Richter (GR), truncated GR, or exponentially tapered GR distributions. For earthquakes generated assuming a GR distribution, expected moment rates depend strongly on the largest event observed and increase indefinitely over time, never approaching a stable value. For events generated with truncated or tapered distributions expected moment rates increase with time but approach a stable value if moments near the corner moment M_C are thoroughly sampled. Thus, interpreting reported moment rates requires knowledge of the corner moment M_C and the number N of contributing earthquake observations. This article discusses how to estimate a critical number of events N_large where the approach to stability begins; N_large depends more strongly M_C than on the ß-value, and only weakly on whether one simulates the observations with a truncated or tapered GR distribution. For situations where N is less than N_large, the article discusses how to adjust moment rates to account for the expected time dependence and also explores ways for estimating rates that reduce the dependence on the largest event.

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