Seismicity models based on Coulomb stress calculations

Our fundamental, physical, understanding of earthquake generation is that stress-build-up leads to earthquakes within the brittle crust rupturing mainly pre-existing crustal faults.While absolute stresses are difficult to estimate, the stress changes induced by earthquakes can be calculated, and these have been shown to effect the location and timing of subsequent events. Furthermore, constitutive laws derived from laboratory experiments can be used to model the earthquake nucleation on faults and their rupture propagation. Exploiting this physical knowledge quantitative seismicity models have been built. In this article, we discuss the spatiotemporal seismicity model based on the rate-and-state dependent frictional response of fault populations introduced by Dieterich (1994). This model has been shown to explain a variety of observations, e.g. the Omori-Utsu law for aftershocks. We focus on the following issues: (i) necessary input information; (ii) model implementation; (iii) data-driven parameter estimation and (iv) consideration of the involved epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties.