Earthquake forecasting model in Albania

Abstract
We proposed an earthquake forecasting model for Albania, one of the most seismic
regions in Europe, to give an overview of seismic activity by implementing area
source and smoothing approaches. The earthquake catalogue was firstly declustered
to evaluate the completeness time window and magnitude of completeness for shallow
events. Considering catalogue completeness, the events with M≥4.0 during the period
of time 1960 – 2006 were implemented for forecasting seismicity in 20 area sources
covering the region of study and each grid cell with a size of 0.2 x 0.2 degrees. Our
results from both models show a high seismic rate along the western coastline and
south part of the study area, consistent with previous studies and currently active
regions. To further evaluate the seismicity results from the models, we introduced a
Molchan diagram to investigate the correlation between a model and observations of
earthquake events. The catalogue from 1960 to 2006 is regarded as the “learning
period” for model construction, and the catalogue data covering the period of time
2018-2020 is the “testing period” for comparing and validating the results. The
Molchan diagram suggests that both models are significantly better than random
distributed, confirming their forecasting abilities. Our results could provide crucial
information for subsequent probabilistic seismic hazard assessment.

Keywords: area sources, declustering, earthquake catalogue, Molchan diagram,
probabilistic seismic hazard assessment, smoothing model,.