SCEC Award Number 18147 View PDF
Proposal Category Workshop Proposal
Proposal Title CSEP Workshop: Predictive Skill across Tectonic Settings and Planning CSEP2.0
Investigator(s)
Name Organization
Maximilian Werner University of Bristol (United Kingdom) Thomas Jordan University of Southern California Warner Marzocchi Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (Italy) Andrew Michael United States Geological Survey David Rhoades GNS Science (New Zealand) Hiroshi Tsuruoka University of Tokyo (Japan)
Other Participants
SCEC Priorities 5a, 5b, 1e SCEC Groups Seismology, CSEP, EFP
Report Due Date 10/08/2018 Date Report Submitted 11/14/2018
Project Abstract
 The Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP) aims to develop a global cyberinfrastructure for the independent evaluation of earthquake forecasting models and predic-tion algorithms, both prospectively and retrospectively. CSEP thereby contributes to an objective and independent assessment of the predictive power of scientific hypotheses about earthquake occurrences.

The 2018 CSEP workshop focused on the transition to CSEP2.0. After recruiting Bill Savran as CSEP software programmer and publication of a 2018 SRL special issue with 9 papers on the results of CSEP1.0, the CSEP community focused on planning the next phase for CSEP. The current CSEP infrastructure cannot accommodate the new scientific experiments we wish to con-duct, from several points of view: 1) the current forecast specification is too restrictive, 2) the cur-rent CSEP work flow is too prescriptive, and 3) new, computationally costly models have become available (e.g. UCERF3ETAS).

After perspectives on CSEP2 priorities from SCEC, the USGS and the international CSEP com-munity (US, Europe, Japan, Italy, New Zealand, China), participants presented and developed blueprints for plans for evaluating new types of forecast models, including the current USGS Op-erational Aftershock Forecast (OAF) models (Reasenberg-Jones, FAST-ETAS) and California’s UCERF3-ETAS.
Intellectual Merit The results contribute to SCEC’s goal of understanding the predictability of earthquakes. The workshop has led to new blueprints of forecast experiments that target the predictive skill of USGS and other OEF and OAF models. The developed tests for consistency between observations and forecasts are to a large extent new, original con-cepts.
Broader Impacts The predictability of earthquakes is of broad interest. Government agencies use seismic hazard models for building planning and other purposes, but the underlying hypotheses in source models remain debated. Our results contrib-ute to this debate. SCEC-sponsored CSEP workshops are the global focal point for CSEP collaborations and pro-gress.
Exemplary Figure Figure 1: From Field et al. 2017. Illustration of forecasts specified as sets of synthetic catalogs, here using the u3etas and no-faults-u3etas models. u3etas is a high-priority target for CSEP-testing.