Fig. 2: Pre-drop velocity level as a control on the relaxation timescale and corresponding synthetic time-series.

a Recoveries after individual seismic events, normalised by the amplitude of the drop. The colour indicates the relevant pre-drop velocity. The thick line shows the early average recovery observed after the Tocopilla and Iquique main shocks. b Fitted maximum recovery timescales for the recoveries shown in (a) (N = 18). The black lines show the best fit exponential scaling (\({\tau }_{\max }=\exp (a\cdot {V}_{0}+b)\) for a  =  5.2226.10⁻¹ and b = − 7.7645.10²) and its standard deviation. c Synthetic velocity time-series built by superposition of relaxations obtained with the relationship shown in b The grey line shows the instrumental data. d Synthetic velocity time-series built by superposition of constant timescales of relaxation, indicated by the colour of the curves. e Nash-Sutcliff efficiency (NSE) for all tested models with constant \({\tau }_{\max }\), the colours correspond to relaxation timescales shown in (d). The dashed line is the NSE value for the dv/v model obtained with the scaling on (c).