Periodic seismicity detection without declustering

Abstract: Any periodic variations of earthquake occurrence rates in response to small, known, periodic stress variations provide important opportunities to learn about the earthquake nucleation process. Yet, reliable detection of earthquake periodicity is complicated by the presence of earthquake clustering due to aftershocks and foreshocks. Existing methods for detecting periodicity in an earthquake catalogue typically require the prior removal of these clustered events. Declustering is a highly uncertain process, so declustering methods are inherently non-unique. Incorrect declustering may remove some independent events, or fail to remove some aftershocks or foreshocks, or both. These two types of error could respectively lead to false negative or false positive reporting of periodic seismicity. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new method for detecting earthquake periodicity that does not require declustering. Our approach is to modify the existing Schuster Spectrum Test (SST) by adapting a test statistic for periodic seismicity to account for the presence of clustered earthquakes within the catalogue without requiring their identification and removal.