Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP)

The goal of CSEP is to develop a virtual, distributed laboratory—a collaboratory—that can support a wide range of scientific prediction experiments in multiple regional or global natural laboratories. This earthquake system science approach seeks to provide answers to the questions: (1) How should scientific prediction experiments be conducted and evaluated? and (2) What is the intrinsic predictability of the earthquake rupture process?

Contributions may include: (1) Establishing rigorous procedures in controlled environments (testing centers) for registering prediction procedures, which include the delivery and maintenance of versioned, documented code for making and evaluating predictions including intercomparisons to evaluate prediction skills; (2) Constructing community-endorsed standards for testing and evaluating probability-based and alarm-based predictions; (3) Developing hardware facilities and software support to allow individual researchers and groups to participate in prediction experiments; (4) Providing prediction experiments with access to data sets and monitoring products, authorized by the agencies that produce them, for use in calibrating and testing algorithms; and (5) Conducting workshops to facilitate international collaboratories.

A major focus of CSEP is to develop international collaborations between the regional testing centers and to accommodate a wide-ranging set of prediction experiments involving geographically distributed fault systems in different tectonic environments.