Statistical analysis of time-dependent earthquake occurrence and its impact on hazard in the low seismicity region Lower Rhine Embayment

The time-dependence of earthquake occurrence is mostly ignored in standard seismic hazard assessment even though earthquake clustering is well known. In this work, we attempt to quantify the impact of more realistic dynamics on the seismic hazard estimations. We include the time and space dependences between earthquakes into the hazard analysis via Monte Carlo simulations. Our target region is the Lower Rhine Embayment, a low seismicity area in Germany. Including aftershock sequences by using the epidemic type aftershock-sequence (ETAS) model, we find that on average the hypothesis of uncorrelated random earthquake activity underestimates the hazard by 5–10 per cent. Furthermore, we show that aftershock activity of past large earthquakes can locally increase the hazard even centuries later. We also analyse the impact of the so-called long-term behaviour, assuming a quasi-periodic occurrence of main events on a major fault in that region. We found that a significant impact on hazard is only expected for the special case of a very regular recurrence of the main shocks.