Real-time forecast of aftershocks from a single seismic station signal

The evaluation of seismic hazard in the hours following large earthquakes is strongly affected by biases due to difficulties in determining earthquake location. This leads to the huge incompleteness of instrumental catalogs. Here we show that if, on the one hand, the overlap of aftershock coda waves hides many small events, on the other hand, it leads to a well-determined empirical law controlling the decay of the amplitude of the seismic signal at a given site. The fitting parameters of this law can be related to those controlling the temporal decay of the aftershock number, and it is then possible to obtain short-term postseismic occurrence probability from a single recorded seismic signal. We therefore present a novel procedure which, without requiring earthquake location, produces more accurate and almost real-time forecast, in a site of interest, directly from the signal of a seismic station installed at that site.