Earthquake forecasting model in Albania

<p>Abstract<br>We proposed an earthquake forecasting model for Albania, one of the most seismic<br>regions in Europe, to give an overview of seismic activity by implementing area<br>source and smoothing approaches. The earthquake catalogue was firstly declustered<br>to evaluate the completeness time window and magnitude of completeness for shallow<br>events. Considering catalogue completeness, the events with M&#8805;4.0 during the period<br>of time 1960 &#8211; 2006 were implemented for forecasting seismicity in 20 area sources<br>covering the region of study and each grid cell with a size of 0.2 x 0.2 degrees. Our<br>results from both models show a high seismic rate along the western coastline and<br>south part of the study area, consistent with previous studies and currently active<br>regions. To further evaluate the seismicity results from the models, we introduced a<br>Molchan diagram to investigate the correlation between a model and observations of<br>earthquake events. The catalogue from 1960 to 2006 is regarded as the &#8220;learning<br>period&#8221; for model construction, and the catalogue data covering the period of time<br>2018-2020 is the &#8220;testing period&#8221; for comparing and validating the results. The<br>Molchan diagram suggests that both models are significantly better than random<br>distributed, confirming their forecasting abilities. Our results could provide crucial<br>information for subsequent probabilistic seismic hazard assessment.</p><p><br>Keywords: area sources, declustering, earthquake catalogue, Molchan diagram,<br>probabilistic seismic hazard assessment, smoothing model,.</p>