- journal_title：Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America
- Contributor：A. Posadas ; T. Hirata ; F. Vidal
- Publisher：Seismological Society of America
- Date：2002-
- Format：text/html
- Language：en
- Identifier：10.1785/0120000247
- journal_abbrev：Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America
- issn：0037-1106
- volume：92
- issue：2
- firstpage：600
- section：Articles
This article proposes a quantitative method to characterize the spatiotemporal evolution of the seismic activity of a region for a given time interval. The technique is based on the fact that the model whose parameters maximize the mutual information is the best model. These parameters can provide a probabilistic characterization of the evolution of the earthquakes of a region in space and time. To do this, it is necessary to establish a propagation model (cross template [CT] model in this article) and reasonable criteria to decide when an area (whose size β will be found by the model) is considered seismically activated in a period of time τ (whose value is also the result of the application of the method). The results found with the CT model are highly satisfactory and show that our model is a powerful tool to quantitatively characterize spatiotemporal seismic patterns.