Error propagation in time-dependent probability of occurrence for characteristic earthquakes in Italy

Time-dependent models for seismic hazard and earthquake probabilities are at the leading edge of research nowadays. In the framework of a 2-year national Italian project (2005– 2007), we have applied the Brownian passage time (BPT) renewal model to the recently released Database of Individual Seismogenic Sources (DISS) to compute earthquake probability in the period 2007–2036. Observed interevent times on faults in Italy are absolutely insufficient to characterize the recurrence time. We, therefore, derived mean recurrence intervals indirectly. To estimate the uncertainty of the results, we resorted to the theory of error propagation with respect to the main parameters: magnitude and slip rate. The main issue concerned the high variability of slip rate, which could hardly be reduced by exploiting geodetic constraints. We did some validation tests, and interesting considerations were derived from seismic moment budgeting on the historical earthquake catalog. In a time-dependent perspective, i.e., when the date of the last event is known, only 10–15% of the 115 sources exhibit a probability of a characteristic earthquake in the next 30 years higher than the equivalent Poissonian probabilities. If we accept the Japanese conventional choice of probability threshold greater than 3% in 30 years to define “highly probable sources,” mainly intermediate earthquake faults with characteristic M < 6, having an elapsed time of 0.7–1.2 times the recurrence interval are the most “prone” sources. The number of highly probable sources rises by increasing the aperiodicity coefficient (from 14 sources in the case of variable α ranging between 0.22 and 0.36 to 31 sources out of 115 in the case of an α value fixed at 0.7). On the other hand, in stationary time-independent approaches, more than two thirds of all sources are considered probabilistically prone to an impending earthquake. The performed tests show the influence of the variability of the aperiodicity factor in the BPT renewal model on the absolute probability values. However, the influence on the relative ranking of sources is small. Future developments should give priority to a more accurate determination of the date of the last seismic event for a few seismogenic sources of the DISS catalog and to a careful check on the applicability of a purely characteristic model.