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Overcoming the Achilles’ Heel of the Foreshock Traffic Light System

Description: 

After the occurrence of a moderate to large earthquake, the question shared between Civil Protection, scientists, the population, and all decision makers is only one: Was it the mainshock or a bigger event has yet to come?

According to standard earthquake statistics, the chance that after a moderate earthquake an even larger event will occur within five days and 10 km is typically 5% (Reasenberg and Jones, 1990). Recently, a more specific answer to this question has been given by the Foreshock Traffic Light System (FTLS, Gulia and Wiemer, 2019). The method allows the real-time discrimination between foreshocks and aftershocks in well-monitored regions. However, some expert judgements are required in order to overcome local peculiarities (Brodsky, 2019) such as magnitude of completeness and the duration of the short-term aftershock incompleteness (STAI, Kagan, 2004). We here introduce the new version of the code that, using the b-positive estimator (van der Elst, 2021), successfully overcomes the above-mentioned limits, allowing the implementation of the FTLS already in few hours after a M³6 event without any specific expert judgements.

Session: New Methods and Models for More Informative Earthquake Forecasting

Type: Oral

Date: 4/19/2023

Presentation Time: 09:00 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Laura Gulia

Student Presenter: No

Invited Presentation: Yes

Authors