A 20-Year Journey of Forecasting with the “Every Earthquake a Precursor According to Scale” Model

Nearly 20 years ago, the observation that major earthquakes are generally preceded by an increase in the seismicity rate on a timescale from months to decades was embedded in the “Every Earthquake a Precursor According to Scale” (EEPAS) model. EEPAS has since been successfully applied to regional re...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Geosciences (Basel) 2022-09, Vol.12 (9), p.349
Main Authors: Rhoades, David A., Rastin, Sepideh J., Christophersen, Annemarie
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aftershocks
Analysis
Catalogues
Earth science
Earthquake forecasting
earthquake forecasting model
Earthquake intensity
earthquake precursors
earthquake predictability
Earthquake prediction
Earthquakes
Forecasting
Lead time
Mathematical models
Modelling
Parameters
Precursors
precursory seismicity
Regional development
Regional variations
Scaling
Seismic activity
Seismicity
Seismological research
Seismology
Spacetime
statistical seismology
time-varying earthquake hazard
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Nearly 20 years ago, the observation that major earthquakes are generally preceded by an increase in the seismicity rate on a timescale from months to decades was embedded in the “Every Earthquake a Precursor According to Scale” (EEPAS) model. EEPAS has since been successfully applied to regional real-world and synthetic earthquake catalogues to forecast future earthquake occurrence rates with time horizons up to a few decades. When combined with aftershock models, its forecasting performance is improved for short time horizons. As a result, EEPAS has been included as the medium-term component in public earthquake forecasts in New Zealand. EEPAS has been modified to advance its forecasting performance despite data limitations. One modification is to compensate for missing precursory earthquakes. Precursory earthquakes can be missing because of the time-lag between the end of a catalogue and the time at which a forecast applies or the limited lead time from the start of the catalogue to a target earthquake. An observed space-time trade-off in precursory seismicity, which affects the EEPAS scaling parameters for area and time, also can be used to improve forecasting performance. Systematic analysis of EEPAS performance on synthetic catalogues suggests that regional variations in EEPAS parameters can be explained by regional variations in the long-term earthquake rate. Integration of all these developments is needed to meet the challenge of producing a global EEPAS model.
ISSN:2076-3263
2076-3263
DOI:10.3390/geosciences12090349