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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.
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.
Well, it's not that useful if you're planning a vacation, but if you're someone who's looking to buy a house somewhere in the state of California which you intend to pay insurance on for the next twenty years, it's tremendously valuable (especially to the insurance agencies).