Spatiotemporal variations of seismicity before major earthquakes in the Japanese area and their relation with the epicentral locations

• Published in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2015-01, Vol.112 (4), p.986-989
• Main Authors: Sarlis, Nicholas V., Skordas, Efthimios S., Varotsos, Panayiotis A., Nagao, Toshiyasu, Kamogawa, Masashi, Uyeda, Seiya
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cluster analysis; Earthquakes; Estimating techniques; geophysics; Physical Sciences; Regions; Seismology; spatial variation; temporal variation
• ISSN: 0027-8424; 1091-6490
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1422893112

Using the Japan Meteorological Agency earthquake catalog, we investigate the seismicity variations before major earthquakes in the Japanese region. We apply natural time, the new time frame, for calculating the fluctuations, termedβ, of a certain parameter of seismicity, termedκ₁. In an earlier study, we found thatβcalculated for the entire Japanese region showed a minimum a few months before the shallow major earthquakes (magnitude larger than 7.6) that occurred in the region during the period from 1 January 1984 to 11 March 2011. In this study, by dividing the Japanese region into small areas, we carry out theβcalculation on them. It was found that some small areas showβminimum almost simultaneously with the large area and such small areas clustered within a few hundred kilometers from the actual epicenter of the related main shocks. These results suggest that the present approach may help estimation of the epicentral location of forthcoming major earthquakes.