Verifying the magnitude dependence in earthquake occurrence

Abstract

The existence of magnitude dependence in earthquake triggering has been reported. Such a correlation is linked to the issue of seismic predictability and remains under intense debate whether it is physical or is caused by incomplete data due to short-term aftershocks missing. Working firstly with a synthetic catalogue generated by a numerical model that capture most statistical features of earthquakes and then with an high-resolution earthquake catalogue for the Amatrice-Norcia (2016) sequence in Italy, where for the latter case we employ the stochastic declustering method to reconstruct the family tree among seismic events and limit our analysis to events above the magnitude of completeness, we found that the hypothesis of magnitude correlation can be rejected.