Comparative Analysis of the Methods for Estimating the Magnitude of Completeness of Earthquake Catalogs

Abstract

Abstract—The magnitude of completeness Mc of the earthquakes above which 100% of events are thought to be reliably detected is a vital parameter characterizing the completeness of seismic data. A known fact is that to obtain correct estimates of the parameters of seismicity, it is compulsory to take into account Mc variations in space and time. In this work, we compare six modern methods for estimating Mc. To compare the methods, we use event samples from real instrumental earthquake catalogs and synthetic catalogs generated based on the three models of magnitude distribution. We analyze the dependences of the two first moments of the distributions of Mc estimates on the shape of magnitude distributions and the sample size. We use three models corresponding to sample distributions that occur in the analysis of instrumental earthquake catalogs. Based on the obtained results, we formulate recommendations on selecting the suitable method for estimating the magnitude of completeness Mc.