Effect of Fault Roughness on Aftershock Distribution: Elastic Off‐Fault Material Properties

We perform physics‐based simulations of earthquake rupture propagation on geometrically complex strike‐slip faults to examine the off‐fault stress changes resulting from dynamic fault slip. We consider many different realizations of the fault profile and use the output of our simulations to calculate the Coulomb failure function (CFF) for each realization. We analyze the effects of fault maturity as well as the self‐affine character of the fault surface on the stress field. To quantify our results, we calculate the probability density function for the CFF as a function of distance and observe that the CFF values show a greater variability in the near‐fault region (distance