Earthquakes occur with great spatio-temporal variability, which emerges from the complex interactions between them. Significant progress is being made towards understanding spatio-temporal correlations, scaling laws and clustering, and the emergence of seismicity patterns. New models being developed in statistical seismology have direct implications for time-dependent seismic hazard assessment and probabilistic earthquake forecasting. In addition, the increasing amount of earthquake data available on local to global scales provides new opportunities for model testing.


This session focuses both on recent insights on the physical processes responsible for the distribution of earthquakes in space and time, and on new models and techniques for quantifying the seismotectonic process and its evolution. Particular emphasis will be placed on:
- physical and statistical models of earthquake occurrence;
- analysis of earthquake clustering;
- spatio-temporal properties of earthquake statistics;
- quantitative testing of earthquake occurrence models;
- implications for time-dependent hazard assessment;
- methods for earthquake forecasting; and
- data analyses and requirements for model testing.

Confirmed solicited speaker: Jiancang Zhuang (The Institute of Statistical Mathematics Tokyo, Japan)