| A systematic increase in the seismicity rate within a broad region before a large earthquake is known as "accelerating moment release" (AMR). AMR has been proposed as a precursor that may be used to forecast large earthquakes. However, there is a finite probability that AMR could be due to random variations in the background seismicity rate. AMR that does not culminate in a large earthquake is called a "false alarm." To test the false alarm rate, synthetic earthquake catalogs are created and searched for AMR. To address the importance of aftershocks and the spatial distribution of earthquakes about a fault, the events in the catalogs are temporally and spatially clustered. The false alarm rate is shown to depend strongly on the degree of acceleration in the background seismicity. A small number of events and temporal clustering in the synthetic catalogs are shown to increase the false alarm rate. |
