The 2013 European Seismic Hazard Model: key components and results

The 2013 European Seismic Hazard Model (ESHM13) results from a community-based probabilistic seismic hazard assessment supported by the EU-FP7 project “Seismic Hazard Harmonization in Europe” (SHARE, 2009–2013). The ESHM13 is a consistent seismic hazard model for Europe and Turkey which overcomes the limitation of national borders and includes a through quantification of the uncertainties. It is the first completed regional effort contributing to the “Global Earthquake Model” initiative. It might serve as a reference model for various applications, from earthquake preparedness to earthquake risk mitigation strategies, including the update of the European seismic regulations for building design (Eurocode 8), and thus it is useful for future safety assessment and improvement of private and public buildings. Although its results constitute a reference for Europe, they do not replace the existing national design regulations that are in place for seismic design and construction of buildings. The ESHM13 represents a significant improvement compared to previous efforts as it is based on (1) the compilation of updated and harmonised versions of the databases required for probabilistic seismic hazard assessment, (2) the adoption of standard procedures and robust methods, especially for expert elicitation and consensus building among hundreds of European experts, (3) the multi-disciplinary input from all branches of earthquake science and engineering, (4) the direct involvement of the CEN/TC250/SC8 committee in defining output specifications relevant for Eurocode 8 and (5) the accounting for epistemic uncertainties of model components and hazard results. Furthermore, enormous effort was devoted to transparently document and ensure open availability of all data, results and methods through the European Facility for Earthquake Hazard and Risk (www.​efehr.​org)

Global models for short-term earthquake forecasting and predictive skill assessment

We present rigorous tests of global short-term earthquake forecasts using Epidemic Type Aftershock Sequence models with two different time kernels (one with exponentially tapered Omori kernel (ETOK) and another with linear magnitude dependent Omori kernel (MDOK)). The tests are conducted with three different magnitude cutoffs for the auxiliary catalog (M3, M4 or M5) and two different magnitude cutoffs for the primary catalog (M5 or M6), in 30 day long pseudo prospective experiments designed to forecast worldwide M ≥ 5 and M ≥ 6 earthquakes during the period from January 1981 to October 2019. MDOK ETAS models perform significantly better relative to ETOK ETAS models. The superiority of MDOK ETAS models adds further support to the multifractal stress activation model proposed by Ouillon and Sornette (2005). We find a significant improvement of forecasting skills by lowering the auxiliary catalog magnitude cutoff from 5 to 4. We unearth evidence for a self-similarity of the triggering process as models trained on lower magnitude events have the same forecasting skills as models trained on higher magnitude earthquakes. Expressing our forecasts in terms of the full distribution of earthquake rates at different spatial resolutions, we present tests for the consistency of our model, which is often found satisfactory but also points to a number of potential improvements, such as incorporating anisotropic spatial kernels, and accounting for spatial and depth dependant variations of the ETAS parameters. The model has been implemented as a reference model on the global earthquake prediction platform RichterX, facilitating predictive skill assessment and allowing anyone to review its prospective performance

Global models for short-term earthquake forecasting and predictive skill assessment

We present rigorous tests of global short-term earthquake forecasts using Epidemic Type Aftershock Sequence models with two different time kernels (one with exponentially tapered Omori kernel (ETOK) and another with linear magnitude dependent Omori kernel (MDOK)). The tests are conducted with three different magnitude cutoffs for the auxiliary catalog (M3, M4 or M5) and two different magnitude cutoffs for the primary catalog (M5 or M6), in 30 day long pseudo prospective experiments designed to forecast worldwide M ≥ 5 and M ≥ 6 earthquakes during the period from January 1981 to October 2019. MDOK ETAS models perform significantly better relative to ETOK ETAS models. The superiority of MDOK ETAS models adds further support to the multifractal stress activation model proposed by Ouillon and Sornette [J. Geophys. Res.: Solid Earth 110, B04306 (2005)]. We find a significant improvement of forecasting skills by lowering the auxiliary catalog magnitude cutoff from 5 to 4. We unearth evidence for a self-similarity of the triggering process as models trained on lower magnitude events have the same forecasting skills as models trained on higher magnitude earthquakes. Expressing our forecasts in terms of the full distribution of earthquake rates at different spatial resolutions, we present tests for the consistency of our model, which is often found satisfactory but also points to a number of potential improvements, such as incorporating anisotropic spatial kernels, and accounting for spatial and depth dependant variations of the ETAS parameters. The model has been implemented as a reference model on the global earthquake prediction platform RichterX, facilitating predictive skill assessment and allowing anyone to review its prospective performance

Democratizing earthquake predictability research: introducing the RichterX platform

Predictability of earthquakes has been vigorously debated in the last decades with the dominant -albeit contested -view being that earthquakes are inherently unpredictable. The absence of a framework to rigorously evaluate earthquake predictions has led to prediction efforts being viewed with scepticism. Consequently, funding for earthquake prediction has dried out and the community has shifted its focus towards earthquake forecasting. The field has benefited from collaborative efforts to organize prospective earthquake forecasting contests by introducing protocols, model formats and rigorous tests. However, these regulations have also created a barrier to entry. Methods that do not share the assumptions of the testing protocols, or whose outputs are not compatible with the contest format, can not be accommodated. In addition, the results of the contests are communicated via a suite of consistency and pair-wise tests that are often difficult to interpret for those not well versed in statistical inference. Due to these limiting factors, while scientific output in earthquake seismology has been on the rise, participation in such earthquake forecasting contests has remained rather limited. In order to revive earthquake predictability research and encourage wide-scale participation, here we introduce a global earthquake prediction platform by the name RichterX. The platform allows for testing of any earthquake prediction in a user-defined magnitude, space, time window anywhere on the globe. Predictions are assigned a reference probability based on a rigorously tested real-time global statistical earthquake forecasting model. In this way, we are able to accommodate methods issuing alarm based predictions as well as probabilistic earthquake forecasting models. We formulate two metrics to evaluate the participants’ predictive skill and demonstrate their consistency through synthetic tests

Rx TimeMachine: A global pseudoprospective earthquake forecast database for training and ranking predictive algorithms

Recent advances in machine learning and pattern recognition methods have propagated into various applications in seismology. Phase picking, earthquake location, anomaly detection and classification applications have benefited also from the increased availability of cloud computing and open-source software libraries. However, applications of these new techniques to the problems of earthquake forecasting and prediction have remained relatively stagnant. The main challenges in this regard have been the testing and validation of the proposed methods. While there are established metrics to quantify the performance of algorithms in common pattern recognition and classification problems, the earthquake prediction problem requires a properly defined reference (null) model to establish the information gain of a proposed algorithm. This complicates the development of new methods, as researchers are required to develop not only a novel algorithm but also a sufficiently robust null model to test it against. We propose a solution to this problem. We have recently introduced a global real-time earthquake forecasting model that can provide occurrence probabilities for a user defined time-space-magnitude window anywhere on the globe (Nandan et al. 2020). In addition, we have proposed the Information Ratio (IR) metric that can rank algorithms producing alarm based deterministic predictions as well as those producing probabilistic forecasts (Kamer et al. 2020). To provide the community with a retrospective benchmark, we have run our model in a pseudoprospective fashion for the last 30 years (1990-2020). We have calculated and stored the earthquake occurrence probabilities for each day, for the whole globe (at ~40km resolution) for various time-space windows (7 to 30 days, 75 to 300 km). These can be queried programmatically via an Application Programmable Interface (API) allowing model developers to train and test their algorithms retrospectively. Here we shall present how the Rx TimeMachine API is used for the training of a simple pattern recognition algorithm and show the algorithm's prospective predictive performance

The 2013 European Seismic Hazard Model: key components and results

The 2013 European Seismic Hazard Model (ESHM13) results from a community-based probabilistic seismic hazard assessment supported by the EU-FP7 project "Seismic Hazard Harmonization in Europe” (SHARE, 2009-2013). The ESHM13 is a consistent seismic hazard model for Europe and Turkey which overcomes the limitation of national borders and includes a through quantification of the uncertainties. It is the first completed regional effort contributing to the "Global Earthquake Model” initiative. It might serve as a reference model for various applications, from earthquake preparedness to earthquake risk mitigation strategies, including the update of the European seismic regulations for building design (Eurocode 8), and thus it is useful for future safety assessment and improvement of private and public buildings. Although its results constitute a reference for Europe, they do not replace the existing national design regulations that are in place for seismic design and construction of buildings. The ESHM13 represents a significant improvement compared to previous efforts as it is based on (1) the compilation of updated and harmonised versions of the databases required for probabilistic seismic hazard assessment, (2) the adoption of standard procedures and robust methods, especially for expert elicitation and consensus building among hundreds of European experts, (3) the multi-disciplinary input from all branches of earthquake science and engineering, (4) the direct involvement of the CEN/TC250/SC8 committee in defining output specifications relevant for Eurocode 8 and (5) the accounting for epistemic uncertainties of model components and hazard results. Furthermore, enormous effort was devoted to transparently document and ensure open availability of all data, results and methods through the European Facility for Earthquake Hazard and Risk ( www.efehr.org )

The 2013 European Seismic Hazard Model: key components and results

The 2013 European Seismic Hazard Model (ESHM13) results from a community-based probabilistic seismic hazard assessment supported by the EU-FP7 project “Seismic Hazard Harmonization in Europe” (SHARE, 2009–2013). The ESHM13 is a consistent seismic hazard model for Europe and Turkey which overcomes the limitation of national borders and includes a through quantification of the uncertainties. It is the first completed regional effort contributing to the “Global Earthquake Model” initiative. It might serve as a reference model for various applications, from earthquake preparedness to earthquake risk mitigation strategies, including the update of the European seismic regulations for building design (Eurocode 8), and thus it is useful for future safety assessment and improvement of private and public buildings. Although its results constitute a reference for Europe, they do not replace the existing national design regulations that are in place for seismic design and construction of buildings. The ESHM13 represents a significant improvement compared to previous efforts as it is based on (1) the compilation of updated and harmonised versions of the databases required for probabilistic seismic hazard assessment, (2) the adoption of standard procedures and robust methods, especially for expert elicitation and consensus building among hundreds of European experts, (3) the multi-disciplinary input from all branches of earthquake science and engineering, (4) the direct involvement of the CEN/TC250/SC8 committee in defining output specifications relevant for Eurocode 8 and (5) the accounting for epistemic uncertainties of model components and hazard results. Furthermore, enormous effort was devoted to transparently document and ensure open availability of all data, results and methods through the European Facility for Earthquake Hazard and Risk (www.efehr.org).ISSN:1570-761XISSN:1573-145