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!

Setting up an Earthquake Forecast Experiment in Italy

Danijel Schorlemmer, Annemarie Christophersen, Andrea Rovida, Phil Mele, Massimiliano Stucchi, & Warner Marzocchi

Accepted July 21, 2010, SCEC Contribution #1440

We describe the setting up of the first earthquake forecasting experiment for Italy within the Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP). CSEP conducts rigorous and truly prospective forecast experiments for different tectonic environments in several forecast testing centers around the globe; forecasts are issued for a future period and also tested only against future observations to avoid any possible bias. As such, experiments need to be completely defined. This includes exact definitions of the testing area, of learning data for the forecast models, and of observation data against which forecasts will be tested to evaluate their performance. Here we present the rules, as taken from the Regional Earthquake Likelihood Models experiment and extended or changed for the Italian experiment. We also present characterizations of learning and observational catalogs that describe the completeness of these catalogs and illuminate inhomogeneities of magnitudes between these catalogs. A particular focus lies on the stability of earthquake recordings of the observational network. These catalog investigations provide guidance for CSEP modelers for developing earthquakes forecasts for submission to the forecast experiment in Italy.

Citation
Schorlemmer, D., Christophersen, A., Rovida, A., Mele, P., Stucchi, M., & Marzocchi, W. (2010). Setting up an Earthquake Forecast Experiment in Italy. Annals of Geophysics, (accepted). doi: 10.4401/ag-4844.