Advanced analysis of geophysical data for improved understanding of the earthquake fault process

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Space-time clustering is a signature of strongly correlated processes, and is a well-documented feature of earthquake seismicity. These patterns provide important information about the earthquake source process, which will be studied here using several different advanced data sets and new, innovative analysis methods developed in the conjunction with the study of the physics of mean-field systems. A method developed for identifying areas of increased probability, the PI index (Tiampo et al., 2002a,b), is based upon recent observational evidence that earthquake faults are characterized by strongly correlated space-time dynamics, as well as numerical simulations of earthquakes that also suggest that space-time pattern structures are non-local, a consequence of strong correlations in the underlying dynamics. In recent work, this technique has been applied to seismicity from various tectonic regions around the world in order to detect systematic variations in seismic moment release in these regions. The long-term goal is to establish a clear relationship between these spatiotemporal patterns and the underlying nonlinear dynamics.