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Estimating the maximum possible earthquake magnitude using extreme value methodology: the Groningen case

Journal Contribution - Journal Article

© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature The area-characteristic, maximum possible earthquake magnitude (Formula presented.) is required by the earthquake engineering community, disaster management agencies and the insurance industry. The Gutenberg–Richter law predicts that earthquake magnitudes M follow a truncated exponential distribution. In the geophysical literature, several estimation procedures were proposed, see for instance, Kijko and Singh (Acta Geophys 59(4):674–700, 2011) and the references therein. Estimation of (Formula presented.) is of course an extreme value problem to which the classical methods for endpoint estimation could be applied. We argue that recent methods on truncated tails at high levels (Beirlant et al. Extremes 19(3):429–462, 2016; Electron J Stat 11:2026–2065, 2017) constitute a more appropriate setting for this estimation problem. We present upper confidence bounds to quantify uncertainty of the point estimates. We also compare methods from the extreme value and geophysical literature through simulations. Finally, the different methods are applied to the magnitude data for the earthquakes induced by gas extraction in the Groningen province of the Netherlands.
Journal: Natural Hazards
ISSN: 0921-030X
Issue: 3
Volume: 98
Pages: 1 - 23
Publication year:2018
BOF-keylabel:yes
IOF-keylabel:yes
BOF-publication weight:1
CSS-citation score:2
Authors:International
Authors from:Higher Education