Mark Quigley, Abigail Jiménez, Brendan Duffy, Tamarah King

A series of Coulomb stress models are used to simulate the independently-derived (Holden et al., 2011) rupture process of Mw 7.1 Darfield earthquake. The 7-fault source model of Beavan et al. (2012) is used for all models. Model differences include (i) differences in the static stress thresholds (0,1,5,10 MPa) that must be reached or exceeded to initiate rupture on a receiver fault, (ii) differences in whether fault-averaged, fault summative total, or maximum values of static stress on receiver faults are used with different threshold values from (i) to evaluate whether rupture proceeds or not, and (iii) whether rupture initiates only on the fault with the maximum static stress value (i.e., hierarchical model) or whether multiple faults where the static stress exceeds the threshold value can rupture concurrently (i.e., stress threshold model). Maximum static stress models in the stress threshold family with thresholds of 1 and 5 MPa most successfully replicate the Holden et al. (2011) Darfield rupture sequence, although further model modifications to thresholds based on fault slip tendency analyses, presented in Quigley et al. (in review), improve the consistency between model observations and the Holden et al. (2011) hypothesis.