Age Uncertainty in Recurrence Analysis of Paleoseismic Records

Abstract

Determining the aperiodicity of large earthquake recurrences is key to forecast future rupture behavior. Aperiodicity is classically expressed as the coefficient of variation of recurrence intervals, though the recent trend to express it as burstiness is more intuitive and avoids minor inaccuracies. Due to the underestimation of burstiness in records with a low number of recurrence intervals, the paradigm is to obtain long paleoseismic records with many events. Here, we present a suite of synthetic paleoseismic records designed around the Weibull and inverse Gaussian distributions that demonstrate that age uncertainty relative to the mean recurrence interval causes overestimation of burstiness. The effects of overestimation and underestimation interact and give complex results for accurate estimates of aperiodicity. Furthermore, we show that the way recurrence intervals are sampled from a paleoseismic record can have strong influences on the resulting statistic and its implication for probabilistic seismic hazard assessment. Comparing values of burstiness between paleoseismic records should therefore be done with caution.