NEW FEATURES OF CACCAMO'S "DELTA/SIGMA" METHOD FOR EARTHQUAKE REPLICA FORECASTING

In 2006 Domenico Caccamo has developed the method for the prediction of the major replicas of earthquakes, called "Delta/Sigma". This method is based on the study of anomalies in the mainaftershock sequences (Caccamo et al., 2006b). and it is derived from some problems encountered in the statistical analysis of temporal series of seismic data (Caccamo et al., 2002). The first version of "Delta/Sigma" algorithm was implemented in Matlab environment by Caterina Laganà and Fabio Massimiliano Barbieri (Caccamo et al., 2006b). The method was tested on several aftershock sequences as: the sequence of November 16, 2000 in Papua New Guinea (Caccamo et al., 2007ba); the sequence of December 27, 2003 in Loyalty Islands (Caccamo et al., 2007b) and the sequence of September 26, 1997 in central Italy: Umbria-Marche (Caccamo et al., 2007c). In the study of Chile earthquake of February 27, 2010, with magnitude M = 8.8, "Delta/Sigma" method has permitted to obtain the forecasting of all replicas with magnitude M > 6.2 with a success percentage of 100% (Caccamo et al., 2013). Recently the method has been further improved, thanks to the collaboration of new researchers such as: Vincenza Pirrone physics, Luigia Puccio numerical analyst, RobertoLotronto expert in computer science, and the graduating student in mathematics Andrea Calderone. Indeed for the same earthquake of Chile we have obtained the forecasting of all replicas with magnitude M > 5.8 with a success percentage of 100% (Caccamo et al., 2017). In this paper we describe the new version of "Delta/Sigma" method that allows us real-time forecasting of earthquake replicas with magnitude M < 5.5. We present the new features and the experimentation done on the data sets of the latest earthquakes of 2017 in Mexico, Russia and Iran. We will show the obtained results and also a table summarizing the real-time forecasts for the 2011 earthquake in Japan, confirming the goodness of the method for all those earthquakes that have the same characteristics of the earthquake in Chile.