New Zealand Statistical Association
2004 Conference
Submitted Talks

Steven Johnston
Victoria University of Wellington

A Point Process Model for Accelerating Seismic Energy Release

Many researchers interested in earthquake forecasting have looked at previous large earthquakes and studied the pattern of smaller earthquakes in the same general area in the time leading up to the large earthquake. A reasonably common observation is that the rate of accumulation of seismic energy released in the area accelerates as the time of the large earthquake approaches. This has lead to the suggestion of a deterministic description of the accumulated energy release as a power-law function of the time remaining until the large earthquake occurs.

In this talk I will present a formulation of accelerating energy release as a stochastic point process model, consistent with the deterministic form mentioned above, along with some results of implementing simulation and estimation routines for the model in the statistical package R.