Publication of the next-day gridded forecasts database for California

A new paper published in Nature Scientific Data — A benchmark database of ten years of prospective next-day earthquake forecasts in California from the Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability — presents a unique benchmark database of more than 50,000 daily gridded forecasts of M ≥ 3.95 earthquakes in California, generated between 1 August, 2007 and 31 August, 2018 by the Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP).

The study, led by Francesco Serafini and colleagues (J. A. Bayona, F. Silva, W. Savran, S. Stockman, P. J. Maechling, and M. J. Werner), describes 25 forecasting models developed by nine international research groups, the tools used to evaluate them, and the processes behind their production.

This database represents one of CSEP’s most extensive efforts to date, with all models operated at the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) testing center in a fully prospective manner and independently from the model developers. It provides the first long-term, prospective testbed for advancing Operational Earthquake Forecasting (OEF) and earthquake predictability research worldwide and serves as a natural benchmark for future forecasting models.

All forecasts are now openly available on Zenodo and through the CSEP website. In addition, we provide on GitHub code and a tutorial to load, visualize, combine, and evaluate the forecasts in the database, along with guidance for creating new forecasts in a format suitable for comparison.

Read the article: A benchmark database of then years of prospective next-day earthquake forecasts in California

Explore the database: download from Zenodo

Explore code and tutorial: visit the GitHub page