Date: January 20, 2026
Location: Online via Zoom
Workshop Organizers: Annemarie Baltay (USGS), Rachel Abercrombie (Boston University)
SCEC Award: 25134
Please register by January 16, 2026
The Community Stress Drop Validation Study is a global community of researchers that always welcomes new members interested in reliable source parameter measurements. Our focus is understanding the physical controls and methodological reasons for similarity or differences in stress drops and other source characterization parameters, to enable more reliable use by the earthquake science community. Over the past four years, over 20 research groups have submitted stress drop estimates from the 2019 Ridgecrest Sequence common dataset, and many more have participated in analysis, workshops and community building. The results to date were recently published in a BSSA special issue on Improving Measurements of Earthquake Source Parameters. So far, we have demonstrated and quantified the uncertainties in methodological biases in stress drop estimates, and their possible magnitude and depth dependencies. Check here for more info and links to recent work and efforts!
The next step is for the community to investigate and test improved approaches and address the remaining unanswered questions, using a new empirical dataset and synthetic datasets. In this workshop, we will discuss ongoing work on new methods on both empirical and synthetic datasets, and discuss new data. We will also discuss future plans for an expanded community study.
Anyone who is interested in stress drops or source parameters, or their use and implication in other fields, is encouraged to attend! We welcome those from all research backgrounds at any stage of your career. As always, we will have multiple opportunities for discussion and participation.
| Time | Description | Presenter |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00 - 10:45 | Session I: Introduction and Ongoing Work We will hear a few invited talks on ongoing work, and then have time for contributed slides and discussion from the whole community on current progress. We are especially interested in how methods have evolved recently given feedback from the first stage of the Community Project. | Rachel Abercrombie, Annemarie Baltay |
| Community progress: Invited talks | Invited speakers | |
| Community progress: Open discussion with contributed slides | All | |
| 10:45 - 11:00 | Break | |
| 11:00 - 12:30 | Session II: New Data Sets Presentations from community members on new empirical datasets and regions, with a discussion and perhaps a vote on what data to choose. | |
| Presentation of candidate datasets and group discussion | Invited speakers to represent different candidate datasets | |
| 12:30 - 13:30 | Break | |
| 13:30 - 15:00 | Session III: Synthetics and looking forward We will hear about previous synthetic data analysis for earthquake stress drop or source parameters, and then a discussion of several stochastic and other simplistic datasets we will use for the Community Project. | |
| Ongoing/completed synthetic dataset study | Invited speakers | |
| Discussion of community synthetic datasets | Dino Bindi, Annemarie Baltay, Peter Shearer, Rachel Abercrombie | |
| Looking forward: SCEC, NSF, international | Rachel Abercrombie | |
| 15:00 - 15:30 | Wrap up and review of morning for those joining from other timezones and commitments | Rachel Abercrombie, Annemarie Baltay |
Using a common dataset, researchers estimate stress drop from the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence. As a community we will compare and validate the estimates to determine physical controls on stress drop variability. Current focus on 55 specific events. For more information, see the SCEC Technical Activity Group (TAG) for Community Stress Drop Validation Group
February 25, 2025
September 8, 2024
January 22, 2024
January 26, 2023
September 10, 2022
November 4, 2021
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