Abstract
Short term aftershock incompleteness (STAI) can strongly bias any
analysis built on the assumption that seismic catalogs have a complete
record of events. Despite several attempts to tackle this issue, we are
far from trusting any dataset in the immediate future of a large shock
occurrence. Here we introduce RESTORE (REal catalogs STOchastic
REplenishment), a Python toolbox implementing a stochastic gap-filling
method, which automatically detects the STAI gaps and reconstructs the
missing events in the space-time-magnitude domain. The algorithm is
based on empirical earthquake properties and relies on a minimal number
of assumptions about the data. Through a numerical test, we show that
RESTORE returns an accurate estimation of the number of missed events
and correctly reconstructs their magnitude, location and occurrence
time. We also conduct a real-case test, by applying the algorithm to the
Mw 6.2 Amatrice aftershocks sequence. The STAI-induced gaps are filled
and missed earthquakes are restored in a way which is consistent with
data. RESTORE, which is made freely available, is a powerful tool to
tackle the STAI issue, and will hopefully help to implement more robust
analyses for advancing operational earthquake forecasting and seismic
hazard assessment.