Eur. Phys. J. B 64, 551-555 (2008)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2008-00057-5

Statistical properties and universality in earthquake and solar flare occurrence

¹ Department of Information Engineering, Second University of Naples and CNISM, Aversa (CE), Italy
² Department of Environmental Sciences, Second University of Naples and CNISM, Caserta, Italy
³ Department of Physics and Complexity Science, University of Warwick, UK, and INFN Naples, Italy

Received: 28 August 2007
Revised: 23 November 2007
Published online: 8 February 2008

Abstract

Earthquakes are phenomena of great complexity, however some simple general laws govern the statistics of their occurrence. Some of these most important laws exhibit scale invariance, as the Gutenberg-Richter law and the Omori law. The origin of these scaling behaviours is not yet fully understood and a natural fondamental question concerns the existence of these features also in other complex phenomena. A direct inspection of experimental catalogues has shown that the stochastic processes underlying solar flare and earthquake occurrence have universal properties. Another intensively debated question is the existence of correlations between magnitudes of subsequent earthquakes. Our recent analysis of the Southern California Catalogue has shown that non-zero magnitude correlations exist. A branching model based on a dynamical scaling hypothesis, relating magnitude to time, reproduces the hierarchical organization in time and magnitude of events and the observed magnitude correlations.