Multifractal characterization of seismic activity at Esmeraldas and Manabí provinces (Ecuador)

Due to the enormous impact of the seismic activity and the need to deepen more in the detailed knowledge of its behaviour, this research work describe an analysis of the multifractal nature of the magnitude, inter-distance and interevent time series of the earthquakes that occurred at the provinces of Manabí and Esmeraldas in Ecuador, during the years 2011-2017, which is an area with a high seismic activity. For this study the Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis or (MF-DFA) has been used, which allows the detection of multifractality in non-stationary series as well as a series of parameters of non-linear characterization. The obtained results revealed that the interevent time series presents the higher degree of multifractality than the two previously mentioned. In addition, the Hurst exponent values were in a non-proportional function to (q), which is a weight value indicating the multifractal behaviour of the dynamics of the earthquakes analysed in this work. Finally, several multifractal parameters were calculated resulting that all the series were skewed to the right which reflects that small variations in the series are more dominant than large fluctuations.