Premonitory raise of the earthquakes' correlation range: Lesser Antilles

We apply to the observed seismicity of Lesser Antilles a short term earthqu ake precursor which has been recently found by analysis of synthetic seismi city. 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 earthq uakes with magnitude 5.5 or above. Four such earthquakes occurred in the te rritory considered during 1984-1998. The alarms occupy 0.5% of the total ti me-space. Three alarms happened to be correct, two alarms were false and on e earthquake was missed by prediction. The alarms are very stable to variat ion of adjustable parameters of prediction method. In view of this stabilit y, such a prediction is unusually good even for retrospective analysis. We present this prediction method as a hypothesis to be tested on advance pred iction. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.