Long‐Term Earthquake Hazard in North China Estimated from a Modern Catalog

Abstract

Abstract In this study, to obtain optimal estimates of the earthquake hazard in North China based on the modern earthquake catalog, we used two variable kernel function estimation methods, proposed by Stock and Smith, and Zhuang, the Bayesian Delaunay tessellation smoothing method by Ogata (ODTB), and a newly proposed incomplete centroidal Voronoi tessellation (ICVT) method, to calculate the total and background seismic spatial occurrence rates for the study area. The sophisticated ODTB method is more stable than the others, but is relatively expensive, in terms of computation demands, whereas Zhuang et al.’s kernel estimate and the new ICVT method are able to provide reasonable estimates and easier to implement. We also calculated the spatial variations of the b‐value, using the Bayesian method with smoothness prior proposed by Ogata. Using comparative analyses and simulation experiments, we show that all of the methods give similar spatial patterns of seismic occurrences.