A NEW APPROACH FOR MODELING EARTHQUAKE MAGNITUDE PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTION

For obtaining the (theoretical) earthquake magnitude probability distribution, the McGuire-Arabasz equation is commonly used with the b-value calibrated from the Gutenberg-Richter relationship. In this paper, we propose a new method, also based on the McGuire-Arabasz equation, while using the b-value directly calibrated from the observed magnitude probability distribution. We examined the new method with 149,879 earthquakes from five regions, and all of the tests show that the new approach outperforms the current method for modeling the observed magnitude probability distributions.