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Title: Spatio-temporal distribution of Oklahoma earthquakes: Exploring relationships using a nearest-neighbor approach: Nearest-neighbor analysis of Oklahoma

Journal Article · · Journal of Geophysical Research. Solid Earth
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1002/2016JB013918· OSTI ID:1369245
ORCiD logo [1];  [2]
  1. National Energy Technology Lab. (NETL), Albany, OR (United States); Oak Ridge Inst. for Science and Education (ORISE), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
  2. National Energy Technology Lab. (NETL), Albany, OR (United States)
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Determining the spatiotemporal characteristics of natural and induced seismic events holds the opportunity to gain new insights into why these events occur. Linking the seismicity characteristics with other geologic, geographic, natural, or anthropogenic factors could help to identify the causes and suggest mitigation strategies that reduce the risk associated with such events. The nearest-neighbor approach utilized in this work represents a practical first step toward identifying statistically correlated clusters of recorded earthquake events. Detailed study of the Oklahoma earthquake catalog’s inherent errors, empirical model parameters, and model assumptions is presented. We found that the cluster analysis results are stable with respect to empirical parameters (e.g., fractal dimension) but were sensitive to epicenter location errors and seismicity rates. Most critically, we show that the patterns in the distribution of earthquake clusters in Oklahoma are primarily defined by spatial relationships between events. This observation is a stark contrast to California (also known for induced seismicity) where a comparable cluster distribution is defined by both spatial and temporal interactions between events. These results highlight the difficulty in understanding the mechanisms and behavior of induced seismicity but provide insights for future work.

Research Organization:
National Energy Technology Lab. (NETL), Albany, OR (United States). In-house Research
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
OSTI ID:
1369245
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1375065
Report Number(s):
NETL-PUB-20788
Journal Information:
Journal of Geophysical Research. Solid Earth, Vol. 122, Issue 7; ISSN 2169-9313
Publisher:
American Geophysical UnionCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 16 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (3)

Narrow Spatial Aftershock Zones for Induced Earthquake Sequences in Oklahoma journal September 2019
Probabilistic identification of earthquake clusters using rescaled nearest neighbour distance networks journal January 2019
Cumulative spatial impact layers: A novel multivariate spatio‐temporal analytical summarization tool journal June 2019

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58 GEOSCIENCES
cluster analysis
natural and induced seismicity
nearest-neighbor approach