Test of Poisson Process for Earthquakes in and around Korea

Since Cornell's work on the probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (hereafter, PSHA), majority of PSHA computer codes are assuming that the earthquake occurrence is Poissonian. To the author's knowledge, it is uncertain who first opened the issue of the Poisson process for the earthquake occurrence. The systematic PSHA in Korea, led by the nuclear industry, were carried out for more than 25 year with the assumption of the Poisson process. However, the assumption of the Poisson process has never been tested. Therefore, the test is of significance. We tested whether the Korean earthquakes follow the Poisson process or not. The Chi-square test with the significance level of 5% was applied. The test turned out that the Poisson process could not be rejected for the earthquakes of magnitude 2.9 or larger. However, it was still observed in the graphical comparison that some portion of the observed distribution significantly deviated from the Poisson distribution. We think this is due to the small earthquake data. The earthquakes of magnitude 2.9 or larger occurred only 376 times during 34 years. Therefore, the judgment on the Poisson process derived in the present study is not conclusive