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NASA Quakesim Predicts 15 Out of 16 CA Quakes
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.""
How many did it predict that never happened?
The article is vague. No mention of whether there were any false positives. People will get fed up really quickly if told to evacuate and no quake comes.
Also, it's not clear to me that what their predicting ("hotspots") is the same thing as predicting when an earthquake will happen. How long do individual "hotspots" exist in one place?
Still, earthquake and other Earth-sci prediction simulations can be useful. Just probably better for long-term planning than individual predictions.
I wouldn't exactly say they predicted these quakes. From what the article says, it seems like they just have a list of places where they say a >5 quake will occur between 2000 and 2010. Whoop-dee-fucking-doo. Anything under a 6 is less annoying to a Californian than a fly buzzing around your house. For anything over a 6.5 or so, being this accurate about WHERE the quake will occur is next to useless if you can't be more accurate about WHEN it will occur.
This is not meant to diminish the accomplishments of these researchers. I'm sure this is a very important stepping stone to greater advances. However, this won't be useful to most people until they can predict with much greater accuracy the magnitude of the quake and the timeframe in which it will occur.