Possible Problems of Evaluation of Spatial-Temporal Features of Earthquake Catalog Representativity: Case Study for the Kamchatka Catalog of Geophysical Survey of RAS

Abstract

The completeness of the catalog, understood as the magnitude threshold from which earthquakes are recorded without gaps, is usually determined by the linear part of the magnitude-frequency relationship in accordance with the Gutenberg-Richter law. The article provides examples of an incorrect estimate of the completeness of the Kamchatka earthquake catalog. The author used the earthquake catalog of the Kamchatka branch of the Geophysical Survey RAS. The article shows that the value of this underestimation cannot be explained by the peculiarities of the earthquake registrations and further processing at various stages of the development of the Kamchatka network. The formal assessment of large spatial or temporal samples from the catalog gives a significant underestimation of the real representativity of the catalog. This effect is associated with spatio-temporal variations of b-value.

Keywords

• Kamchatka
• representativity of catalog
• b-value
• Gutenberg-Richter Law