Resumen de When is the probability of a large earthquake too small?
Warner Marzocchi, Iunio Iervolino, Massimiliano Giorgio, Giuseppe Falcone
Classical probabilistic seismic-hazard models (Cornell, 1968), which typically refer to the homogeneous Poisson process for earthquake occurrence, are not able to model explicitly the space-time clustering of earthquakes. Clustering may be particularly evident in time windows of days and weeks (e.g., Kagan and Knopoff, 1987; Ogata, 1988), but it may be still appreciable in the medium term, because the time sequences to large earthquakes may last long (Kagan and Jackson, 1991; Parsons, 2002; Faenza et al., 2003; Marzocchi and Lombardi, 2008). The modeling of such a space–time clustering is an important subject of seismological research (Jordan et al., 2011). In fact, accounting for time–space clustering of earthquakes may provide additional information, not only to seismic-hazard assessment aimed at structural design (e.g., Iervolino et al., 2014; Marzocchi and Taroni, 2014), but also to short-term seismic risk management. The latter issue has been explored by the International Commission for Earthquake Forecasting, established after the L’Aquila earthquake in 2009, which paves the way to the so-called operational earthquake forecasting (OEF). As defined by Jordan et al. (2011), OEF comprises procedures for gathering and disseminating authoritative information about the time dependence of seismic hazards to help communities prepare for potentially destructive earthquakes.
Notwithstanding some recent earthquake sequences showing the importance of tracking the time evolution of seismic hazard (e.g., as for the recent Canterbury sequence in New Zealand; Wein and Becker, 2013), currently OEF represents a controversial issue in seismology. Most critics are not focused on debating the scientific credibility of the models used to describe short-term earthquake clustering, but they dispute the usefulness (if not the potential danger) of the information they provide, in particular, the probability of a damaging event in a short time frame. According to OEF models available in the literature, the weekly probability of …
