Coupled Stress Release Model for Time-dependent Seismicity

—Based on the original stress release model of seismicity proposed by Vere-Jones (1978), this paper has developed a stochastic coupled stress release model of time-dependent seismicity, which considers the earthquake interaction and stress transfer between different seismic subregions. As an example, the model is applied to a statistical analysis of the historical earthquake catalog with magnitude M ≥ 6.0 during the period from 1480 to 1996 in North China. According to the Akaike information criterion (AIC), the results show that the coupled stress release model is better than the original model, which demonstrates the existence of long-range correlations between different seismic subregions. We also apply both the stochastic (original and developed coupled) models to analyze the synthetic catalog produced by a cellular automata model, which is based on mechanics of a slide-spring-damper system to model the fault network. The stress release model provides a good fit to the synthetic regional stress, and the coupled stress release model provides an improvement in fit to the synthetic catalog over the original model.