Heterogeneous Features of Temporal and Spatial Variation of Earthquake Occurrence in Process of Earthquake Preparation

By applying the GL-value, a parameter describing the heterogeneities in temporal and spatial distribution of moderate and small earthquakes prior to strong earthquakes, the following problems have been studied in the present paper: a systematic investigations have been made on the features of spatial distribution and temporal variation of the high value anomalies ( GL ≥1.0) prior to 28 moderately strong earthquakes with Ms ≥5.0 in the North China region; a systematic study has been made on the reasonability of the lower limit of magnitude, the time window and the space window for calculations at various seismicity levels in this region; the parameters taken in the calculation have been optimized and modified; the anomalous variations of GL-value prior to various moderately strong earthquakes in North China region have been investigated and followed, using the total time-space scanning method. The results of the study have shown that for 82 % of the moderately strong earthquakes in the North China region, obvious anomalous region with high GL-values appears near the future epicenter about 1 ～ 3.5 years before the earthquakes. The earthquakes usually occur in the marginal area of the anomalous zone or near it. Temporal variations of the GL-values in the anomalous zone show that the duration of anomalous ranges between 3 ～ 25 months with a predominant interval of 5 ～ 19 months, into which about 70% the total anomalies fall. The predominant interval of earthquake occurrences is 0 ～ 14 months after ending of the anomaly, into which about 83 % of the total anomalies fall. Based on these results the GL-value method is considered to be a rather effective prediction method for moderately strong earthquakes in the North China region.