Premonitory raise of the earthquakes’ correlation range: Lesser Antilles

We apply to the observed seismicity of Lesser Antilles a short term earthquake precursor which has been recently found by analysis of synthetic seismicity. The latter was generated by a lattice-type “Colliding Cascades” model of interacting elements. Precursor named ROC depicted premonitory increase of the earthquakes correlation range. Here, this precursor is used as a second approximation to the intermediate-term prediction. As a first approximation we use the alarms, determined in the previous publication by the algorithm Seismic Reversal (SR); it depicts premonitory reversal of territorial distribution of seismicity. We consider combined performance of both algorithms in prediction of earthquakes with magnitude 5.5 or above. Four such earthquakes occurred in the territory considered during 1984–1998. The alarms occupy 0.5% of the total time–space. Three alarms happened to be correct, two alarms were false and one earthquake was missed by prediction. The alarms are very stable to variation of adjustable parameters of prediction method. In view of this stability, such a prediction is unusually good even for retrospective analysis. We present this prediction method as a hypothesis to be tested on advance prediction. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.