Connecting Research Communities to Better Assess Earthquake Hazards and Risks

Starting in September 2023, Toño Bayona and Max Werner, from the University of Bristol, and Philip Maechling, from the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), will collaborate with Marco Pagani, Hazard Team Coordinator of the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) Foundation, to explore how pyCSEP and GEM’s OpenQuake software tools might be used together to improve regional and global seismic hazard estimates. OpenQuake is a widely used open-source software developed by GEM for seismic hazard and risk assessment. The challenges of this exploratory research project, funded by a UK EPSRC Impact Acceleration Award, involve creating an “ecosystem” of software code, in which pyCSEP forecasts, data, and tests are compatible with OpenQuake earthquake source models, and exemplifying how CSEP-related research can support GEM’s efforts to quantify hazards and risks due to earthquakes. By the end of this short 3-month project, the group seeks to identify a development roadmap for creating a pyCSEP/OpenQuake software ecosystem that makes CSEP’s model evaluation concepts and techniques accessible to the GEM hazard and risk communities.