Forecasting Moderate Earthquakes in Northern Algeria and Morocco

In this work, we have studied the correlation between locations of MW ≥ 5.0 earthquakes and locations of 5.0 > MW ≥ 4.0 events for Northern Algeria and Morocco. A preliminary study shows that it can be observed a relatively good agreement between locations for these two data sets, that is, minor earthquake locations could be used to forecast future places where will happen moderate and moderate to strong earthquakes. Then, we propose a time-independent forecasting model based on the spatially smoothed seismicity rate of MW ≥ 4.0 earthquakes. Initially, the area under study was divided into square cells. The number of earthquakes with magnitude MW ≥ 4.0 that have taken place at a given cell is counted and smoothed. Finally, a time-independent forecasting model is proposed from the computation of MW ≥ 5.0 and MW ≥ 6.0 earthquake probabilities for each cell for different exposure times. Probabilities are computed considering that seismicity follows both a Poisson process and the Gutenberg-Richter magnitude-frequency relationship.