Study of Minimum Magnitude of Completeness in the North-South Trending Seismic Belt for the Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability Project

To determine the studying region of China Testing Center of the Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP), we adopted the Entire-Magnitude-Range (EMR) method to study the spatial distribution of minimum magnitude of completeness (MC) in the North-South Trending Seismic Belt (NSTSB) during the period from October 1, 2008 to May 31, 2011. Also bootstrap testing was performed to estimate the uncertainty of MC, i.e. δMC. The results show that MC (EMR)=1.6±0.03 for the whole region. From the spatial distributions of MC we find that MC is in the range of ML1.3～2.0 for most regions. Specifically, the spatial distribution of MC is consistent with the distribution of stations indicating high monitoring level in the southern part and low monitoring level in the northern part. Events located with less than three stations have great influence on Mc. Moreover, the uncertainty of minimum magnitude of completeness δMC ranges from 0.07 to 0.22. The spatial distribution of δMC agrees with the seismic rate. The shorter time span may cause larger δMC.