An Operational Earthquake Forecasting Experiment for Israel: Preliminary Results

Giuseppe Falcone, Ilaria Spassiani, Yosef Ashkenazy, Avi Shapira, Rami Hofstetter, Shlomo Havlin, Warner Marzocchi

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

Operational Earthquake Forecasting (OEF) aims to deliver timely and reliable forecasts that may help to mitigate seismic risk during earthquake sequences. In this paper, we build the first OEF system for the State of Israel, and we evaluate its reliability. This first version of the OEF system is composed of one forecasting model, which is based on a stochastic clustering Epidemic Type Earthquake Sequence (ETES) model. For every day of the forecasting time period, January 1, 2016 - November 15, 2020, the OEF-Israel system produces a weekly forecast for target earthquakes with local magnitudes greater than 4.0 and 5.5 in the entire State of Israel. Specifically, it provides space-time-dependent seismic maps of the weekly probabilities, obtained by using a fixed set of the model’s parameters, which are estimated through the maximum likelihood technique based on a learning period of about 32 years (1983–2015). According to the guidance proposed by the Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP), we also perform the N- and S-statistical tests to verify the reliability of the forecasts. Results show that the OEF system forecasts a number of events comparable to the observed one, and also captures quite well the spatial distribution of the real catalog with the exception of two target events that occurred in low seismicity regions.

Original languageEnglish
Article number729282
JournalFrontiers in Earth Science
Volume9
DOIs
StatePublished - 7 Sep 2021

Keywords

  • ETES model
  • operational earthquake forecasting
  • reliable forecasts
  • seismic predictability in the short-term
  • statistical tests

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Earth and Planetary Sciences

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