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NASA Quakesim Predicts 15 Out of 16 CA Quakes

Posted by samzenpus on from the good-odds dept.

Saint Aardvark writes "NASA's QuakeSim project has successfully predicted15 out of 16 of California's earthquakes with magnitude > 5, including 11 since the map was published in 2002. "So far, the technique has only missed one earthquake, a magnitude of 5.2, on June 15, 2004, under the ocean near San Clemente Island.""

5 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Reminds me of early Tornado forecasting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    When they first started to try to predict tornados (right before they happened) a lot of people thought it was impossible, but they managed to do it. And this was before they had Doppler 8 million, just with changes in the pressure and such. A lot of people have tried to say predicting earthquakes will be impossible, but I think with enough research and data it will be as easy and predictable as tornados.

  2. Discussion of this on NPR by BrewerDude · · Score: 5, Informative
    The San Francisco NPR station, KQED, had an interesting discussion on this yesterday on their Forum program.

    Check out the archived version here

    From the blurb:

    Following recent seismic activity in California and the threatened eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State. Forum takes a look at scientific advancements in the study of earthquakes and volcanoes.

    Host: Michael Krasny

    Guests:

    • Dr. Donald Turcotte, professor of geology at UC Davis
    • Dr. Manuel Nathenson, scientist in charge of the Volcano Hazards Team at US Geological Survey in Menlo Park
    • Dr. Roland Burgmann, associate professor at Berkeley Seismological Lab at UC Berkeley Dr. Susan Hough, seismologist at US Geological Survey in Pasadena and author of "Earth Shaking Science: What We Know and Don't Know"
  3. Panic prevention? by Tablizer · · Score: 2, Informative

    I heard that Mexico City was using a quake-prediction system that warned the population about most quakes around 30 seconds before they happened. L.A. declined the technology because they figured that harm caused by the panic would outweigh the quake risk. There would be a fair amount of false alarms.

    They figured the panic would cause more deaths and injuries than the small quakes and in big quakes 30 seconds is not enough to do anything about biggies anyhow.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  4. Fast earthquake alert systems by G4from128k · · Score: 2, Informative

    Some people are working on an earthquake alert system that detects an earthquake at the epicenter and sends an wireless signal out to others. Because radio wave travel faster than ground waves, the alert reaches people seconds before the quake hits. Its not much of a warning, but it may be enough time to shut down some processes, park the heads on the disk drive, turn on the backup generator, etc.

    --
    Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
  5. "weak" quake predictions vs "strong" predictions by peter303 · · Score: 2, Informative

    A successful "weak" quake prediction is defined as beating background probability. For example Southern California (Mohave desert to Mexican border) experiences slightly more than one M5 a year on average; or a M7 in 20 years. Even so, no prediction method method so far, except perhaps Rundle's, has achieved weak prediction.

    However weak prediction is psychologically unsatisfactory for the public. They generally want to know damaging quakes (>M6) within a month in a county size area. This is a thousand times less probable than a successful weak prediction. Furthermore, the tornado and hurricane people found that the public will ignore severe weather prediction with less than a 20% probability of occuring in one day. It will take a lot of work to have successful strong predictions.