Statistical Features of Earthquake Temporal Occurrence

Abstract

A review of the statistical properties of earthquakes is provided, centered mainly in the work of the author (apologies for that). We explain the scaling law for the recurrence-time distributions, its universal character for stationary seismicity and for Omori sequences, the counterintuitive phenomenon of decreasing hazard with time and the increasing of the expected residual recurrence time, the relation of the scaling law with a renormalization-group transformation, and the correlations between recurrence times and magnitudes. Finally, the connections with Bak et al.'s unified scaling law are analyzed.