Revisiting Stepp’s method for the completeness of regional seismic catalogues

Abstract

An important step in seismic hazard analysis is investigating the completeness of available data. Out of the various methods proposed by several researchers, Stepp’s method is one of the most commonly used methods for completeness analysis. Some drawbacks are identified in this method, which results in erroneous estimation of the completeness period. This paper suggests another way of estimation based on the 2-point moving average of the mean annual rate of occurrence of events. The new procedure is able to overcome the problems identified in Stepp’s method and is validated using five catalogues from different regions. The analysis result includes the completeness period determination for different catalogues before and after correction, together with Magnitude-Frequency recurrence relation coefficients compared with Stepp’s method.