TY  - JOUR
ID  - epos1431
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1785/0120040007
IS  - 2
A1  - Woessner, Jochen
A1  - Wiemer, Stefan
Y1  - 2005///
N2  - We introduce a new method to determine the magnitude of complete- ness Mc and its uncertainty. Our method models the entire magnitude range (EMR method) consisting of the self-similar complete part of the frequency-magnitude dis- tribution and the incomplete portion, thus providing a comprehensive seismicity model. We compare the EMR method with three existing techniques, finding that EMR shows a superior performance when applied to synthetic test cases or real data from regional and global earthquake catalogues. This method, however, is also the most computationally intensive. Accurate knowledge of Mc is essential for many seismicity-based studies, and particularly for mapping out seismicity parameters such as the b-value of the Gutenberg-Richter relationship. By explicitly computing the uncertainties in Mc using a bootstrap approach, we show that uncertainties inb-values are larger than traditionally assumed, especially when considering small sample sizes. As examples, we investigated temporal variations of Mc for the 1992 Landers aftershock sequence and found that it was underestimated on average by 0.2 with former techniques. Mapping Mc on a global scale, Mc reveals considerable spatial variations for the Harvard Centroid Moment Tensor (CMT) (5.3 Mc 6.0) and the International Seismological Centre (ISC) catalogue (4.3 Mc 5.0).
PB  - Seismological Society of America
JF  - Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America
VL  - 95
SN  - 0037-1106
TI  - Assessing the Quality of Earthquake Catalogues: Estimating the Magnitude of Completeness and Its Uncertainty
SP  - 684
AV  - none
EP  - 698
ER  -