Operational earthquake forecasting in California: A prototype system combining UCERF3 and CyberShake

Abstract:

Operational earthquake forecasting (OEF) is the dissemination of authoritative information about time-dependent earthquake probabilities to help communities prepare for potentially destructive earthquakes. The goal of OEF is to inform the decisions that people and organizations must continually make to mitigate seismic risk and prepare for potentially destructive earthquakes on time scales from days to decades. To attain this goal, OEF must provide a complete description of the seismic hazard—ground motion exceedance probabilities as well as short-term rupture probabilities—in concert with the long-term forecasts of probabilistic seismic hazard analysis. We have combined the Third Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast (UCERF3) of the Working Group on California Earthquake Probabilities (Field et al., 2014) with the CyberShake ground-motion model of the Southern California Earthquake Center (Graves et al., 2011; Callaghan et al., this meeting) into a prototype OEF system for generating time-dependent hazard maps. UCERF3 represents future earthquake activity in terms of fault-rupture probabilities, incorporating both Reid-type renewal models and Omori-type clustering models. The current CyberShake model comprises approximately 415,000 earthquake rupture variations to represent the conditional probability of future shaking at 285 geographic sites in the Los Angeles region (~236 million horizontal-component seismograms). This combination provides significant probability gains relative to OEF models based on empirical ground-motion prediction equations (GMPEs), primarily because the physics-based CyberShake simulations account for the rupture directivity, basin effects, and directivity-basin coupling that are not represented by the GMPEs.