Exciting news! We're transitioning to the Statewide California Earthquake Center. Our new website is under construction, but we'll continue using this website for SCEC business in the meantime. We're also archiving the Southern Center site to preserve its rich history. A new and improved platform is coming soon!
< Back to Announcement List

SSA Session Debating Fault Model Input Data

Date: 01/03/2012

From Andy Michael (USGS Menlo Park):
---------------------------------------------------

Dear colleagues,

Please consider contributing to, and attending our upcoming SSA session Debating Fault Model Input Data.

You will find below useful information on the meeting, the list of special sessions, the abstract submission deadline, and of course a detailed description of what we envision for this session.

We welcome contributors from deterministic and stochastic modeling, probabilistic modeling, seismology, geodesy, earthquake geology (including geomorphology, paleoseismology, etc), and fault and rock mechanics.

Best regards
Delphine Fitzenz& Andy Michael

2012 Annual Meeting
17-19 April (Tuesday-Thursday), San Diego, California

http://www.seismosoc.org/meetings/2012/
Abstract Submission Deadline 11 January 2012

Debating Fault Model Input Data
how well they are known, what impact they have on predictive results, how they should be reported, and what is missing

Stochastic and physics-based models of fault systems have been developed in an attempt to provide reliable rules of behavior for models of seismogenic regions that can have a predictive power. Whether it be the rate and maximum magnitude of aftershocks, the probability for a rupture to jump from a fault segment to another, or the recurrence behavior of large events on simple faults, our predictions all depend on noisy and potentially incomplete datasets. This affects both empirical deterministic and stochastic models, and the more process- or physics-based models.

In this session, we encourage modelers to choose first order, general rules coming out of their models, and discuss which subset of the input data they are most sensitive to. We also encourage data providers to explain how well these critical data are known and what amount of complexity or variability (in space or time) we could expect these properties to exhibit, based on their observations.

Finally, we also welcome contributions of modelers and statisticians on how the data should be reported to be most useful and to make data-driven model combination approaches "trustworthy", and of data gatherers on whether they think their data are treated well by modelers, or whether they are generally ignored, and why they should be used.

An example of such "sets" of contributions could be:
Model 1 How do the details of fault junctions affect the results of my simulator?
Data 1 How well do we understand the details of fault junctions?
Model 2 Is the influence of a fault half-way through a pull-apart basin on the jump probability a 1st order feature that would resist even if the model faults were heterogeneous?
Data 2 How heterogeneous are the fault geometries or constitutive relationships that we infer?
Model 3 How much of my model results come from the fact that my fault system geometry is fixed?
Data 3 Do we observe fault systems to evolve even over short time scales? What are the characteristics of those places where large events happen on previously unmapped faults?
Model 4 How much of the spatio-temporal patterns of model seismicity come from my failure criterion?
Data 4 Have fault gouge samples been tested for this and alternative failure criteria? What is the most plausible criterion (in a probabilistic sense)?

We welcome contributors from deterministic and stochastic modeling, probabilistic modeling, seismology, geodesy, earthquake geology (including geomorphology, paleoseismology, etc), fault and rock mechanics.

Conveners
Delphine Fitzenz,delphine@uevora.pt, University of Evora, CGE, Evora, Portugal
Andrew Michael,michael@usgs.gov, U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, CA