TY  - JOUR
A1  - Zöller, Gert
T1  - A note on the estimation of the maximum possible earthquake magnitude based on extreme value theory for the Groningen Gas Field
T2  - The bulletin of the Seismological Society of America : BSSA
N2  - Extreme value statistics is a popular and frequently used tool to model the occurrence of large earthquakes. The problem of poor statistics arising from rare events is addressed by taking advantage of the validity of general statistical properties in asymptotic regimes. In this note, I argue that the use of extreme value statistics for the purpose of practically modeling the tail of the frequency-magnitude distribution of earthquakes can produce biased and thus misleading results because it is unknown to what degree the tail of the true distribution is sampled by data. Using synthetic data allows to quantify this bias in detail. The implicit assumption that the true M-max is close to the maximum observed magnitude M-max,M-observed restricts the class of the potential models a priori to those with M-max = M-max,M-observed + Delta M with an increment Delta M approximate to 0.5... 1.2. This corresponds to the simple heuristic method suggested by Wheeler (2009) and labeled :M-max equals M-obs plus an increment." The incomplete consideration of the entire model family for the frequency-magnitude distribution neglects, however, the scenario of a large so far unobserved earthquake.
Y1  - 2022
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/57385
SN  - 0037-1106
SN  - 1943-3573
VL  - 112
IS  - 4
SP  - 1825
EP  - 1831
PB  - Seismological Society of America
CY  - El Cerito, Calif.
ER  -