Physical and Statistical Approaches to Earthquake Modeling and Forecasting

The complexity of earthquake phenomenon highlights the need of integrating observations, modeling and forecasting analyses to achieve significant advances in the scientific research on seismic process and hazard. A multilevel and multidisciplinary approach allows to address this call: statistical analyses, stochastic and physics-stochastic modeling, performance testing, all contribute to produce relevant results to tackle the issue of better understanding the seismic hazard and enhancing resilience. Statistical seismology is the research field which gathers these approaches together, as it comprises procedures to study space-time-magnitude distributions of ongoing sequences, compare local and global seismic activity and develop more sophisticated models to take on the complexity of the phenomenon.

One of the main applications in this field is the Operational Earthquake Forecasting (OEF), already developed in several Countries worldwide, which delivers real-time probabilistic earthquake rates to help in raising and disseminating authoritative information about the time dependency of seismic hazard.

The goal of this collection is to present recent methodological and applicative advances in the study of the earthquake phenomenon, that would represent a relevant progress in the field of statistical seismology. The aim is to contribute in making potential breakthroughs that would help stakeholders to establish rational containment measures of the seismic risk and communities to be prepared for potentially destructive earthquakes.

This Research Topic welcomes theoretical and real-word studies on statistical, stochastic-physical and mathematical applications to earthquake modeling and forecasting. Both advanced original research and review articles are invited. The list of specific themes addressed in this collection includes, but is not limited to:

- Dissemination and analysis of high-quality earthquake catalogs.
- Integration of physics-based models for seismic sequences.
- Performance testing of earthquake forecasting models.
- New developments in data-driven probabilistic models in seismology.
- Advances in statistical techniques to estimate existing models parameters and statistical distributions (e.g. the magnitude frequency distribution).
- Applications to seismic catalogs at different scales (local, regional, global).
- Applications of statistical methodologies to volcanic seismicity.
- Comparison of the existing techniques, models and approaches concerning similar applications, but independently developed by different scientists.
- Development of free, publicly available algorithms of statistical seismology.