Editor's Summary
19 May 2005
Earthquake Forecasting
The difficulty of predicting individual earthquakes accurately often obscures the progress made by seismologists studying the probability of earthquake occurrence. A new approach aims to keep the public in touch with what seismologists know. To coincide with the launch of a new short-term earthquake forecasting system for California, a new website (pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/step) gives a measure of the probability of strong shaking anywhere in California within the next 24 hours. The methodology combines an earthquake occurrence model based on fault data and historical earthquakes with a model of clustering. The resulting forecasts will provide a better understanding of the daily changes in earthquake hazard to the public, media and emergency planners. Cover: San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake (Rykoff Collection/CORBIS).
News and Views: Earthquakes: Future shock in California
For California, probabilistic principles can be applied to the short-term forecasting of further ground-shaking following an earthquake. How such predictions will be used by the public remains to be seen.
Duncan Agnew
doi: 10.1038/435284a
Letter: Real-time forecasts of tomorrow's earthquakes in California
Matthew C. Gerstenberger, Stefan Wiemer, Lucile M. Jones and Paul A. Reasenberg
doi: 10.1038/nature03622
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (244K) | Supplementary information
