New earthquake forecasting system gave reliable forecasts of Italian aftershocks

Scientists have long sought forecasting methods for

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earthquakes, for obvious reasons—unfortunately, to date, little progress has been made despite hundreds of years of effort. Science has advanced one area of forecasting, however: aftershocks that occur after a major quake.

It has been noted that aftershocks can occur in sequences that frequently follow a power series. Because of that, seismologists could make predictions of aftershocks based on the degree of severity of the preceding major quake. But, as the researchers note, there are exceptions—sometimes, aftershocks seemingly occur randomly. Occasionally, they even precede a large quake. It was these exceptions that the researcher sought to address with a new and improved earthquake prediction system.

The system built by the team is called an Operational Earthquake Forecasting (OEF) system, and is based on three predictive models. The first two are models known as epidemic-type aftershock sequences (ETAS), which use clustering information to make predictions. The third was based on the short-term earthquake probability model (STEP), which, as its name implies, is math based.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-earthquake-gave-reliable-italian-aftershocks.html#jCp