john's blog

A colleague just sent along a link to a web site that plans to preserve the history and personal stories associated with the September 4, 2010 M7.1 Christchurch NZ earthquake, and the February 22, 2011 M6.3 Canterbury, NZ earthquake.  You can find the link here.  An excellent way to preserve knowledge about these events and may well aid in helping to prevent similar disasters in the future.

Now its easier than ever to make a forecast for your location.  Just go to the "Personal Earthquake Forecast" on the Tools tab, or go here.  Enter the location where you want to make the forecast.  Click on "Go".  That's all.

One of the advantages of hindsight is that what seemed obscure in the past becomes obvious (here I recommend Duncan Watt's NY Times bestseller: "Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer").  We can see an example of this in the earthquake forecast that we run on this web site.  The NTW method, upon which the global forecast is based, was first developed and published in the peer reviewed literature [1] as a regional forecast over areas the size of California + Nevada.  An assumption implicit in this approach is that earthquakes o

It wasn't the great earthquake in Japan, but the epicenter did land in a region that was identified as a high probablity location. Tsunami warning has been issued.  Figures (screenshots) below.  More details later. Probability of an M>8 in the blue polygon in Figure 1 was estimated as 6.2% within 3 years.  Reasonably high, but not nearly as high as Japan.

Figure 1

Over the weekend I received an email from a colleague, Professor Vladimir ("Volodya") Kossobokov, who works at the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris.  Professor Kossobokov has been a close colleague of Professor Vladimir Keilis-Borok, who is famous for having initiated studies of pattern recognition applied to earthquakes, US presidential elections (along with Allan Lichtman at the American University in Washington, DC) and other areas of interest to forecasters.

Every year, the largest re-insurance companies and others produce year-in-review reports of global natural catastrophes and loss.  Here are links to a few of these from Munich Re, AON Benfield, and Swiss Re (links to others will be inserted when they become available).

The Open Hazards Group is excited to partner with the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) to contribute to the new Multi-Hazards Program as described here.  The APRU is comprised of the 42 leading universities around the Pacific Rim.  The new initiative grew out of discussions initiated by APRU Secretary General Dr.

Its really simple.  You can see earthquake probabilities for your own or any other location. Here are the steps.  We will use the Circle Selection Tool to define a circular region.

1.  Roll over the the Tools tab at the top to see the drop down menu.  Click on the words Earthquake Viewer.

2.  You will see a Google map.  Look to the left side of the map.  Under the "Earthquake Hazard" heading, locate the Circle Selection Tool.  Click on the adjacent little box to the left side.

To further investigate the data underlying the forecast, we defined a polygon of (lat,long) pairs around the main islands of Japan.  These (lat,long) pairs are given by: (34.3,128.2), (38.0,136.8), (45.6,141.0), (42.9,147.7), (32.0,145.5), (27.5,131.5).  These were entered into the ANSS User Interface.  We found the following for the earthquakes occurring from just after the M9.1 event on 3/11/2011 through 12/29/2012 (Note that there is no data in the catalog from 12/30/2012 through today, 1/28/2013): 911 events with M>5;   94 events  with M>6; and 6 events with M>7. 

Unfortunately it is very possible, at least according to the calculations on this web site.  We can use the earthquake viewer, found under the "Tools tab", to define a selection polygon in the Japan region (Figure 1 below).  A relatively recent addition to the viewer tool then computes the numerical probability for events M>5, M>6, M>7, and M>8 for time periods 1 month from now, 1 year from now, and 3 years from now, occurring within the defined region.  Figure 1 below shows that the probability for an M>8 earthquake is very high.