On quite a few occasions in the past I posted notes here discussing projects which I thought people could work on in order to advance our ability to forecast earthquakes. There did not seem to be any interest in any of those projects. And in one of my latest notes I stated that I planned to switch to simply posting updates here instead of continuing to attempt to encourage people to work on those types of projects.

This is one of my forecasting program updates. Much of this information represents my personal opinions rather than established fact.

SUN AND MOON GRAVITY TRIGGERED EARTHQUAKES

For years I have been telling people around the world that my data are indicating to me that forces directly and/or indirectly linked with the gravitational pulls of the sun and the moon are often quite important to earthquake triggering processes. That subject matter has been discussed at length at my two Web sites and in Newsgroup and e-mail reports I have circulated including my latest one which was circulated by e-mail on May 28, 2002. It turns out that the timing of that report was interesting.

In the June issue of “Geology” magazine a group of researchers working with a National Science Foundation grant published a paper discussing their studies of something like 400 low magnitude earthquakes which occurred near the underwater Axial volcano which I gather erupted a few years ago off the coast of Oregon. I have a copy of that publication which the authors apparently feel clearly shows that many of those earthquakes occurred at the same time that sensors they placed on the ocean floor indicated that there was a low point in the ocean water pressure in the vicinity, in other words, a “low tide.”

In their summary section they suggested that the earthquake triggering occurring there might be linked with reduced water weight on the ocean floor. And that would of course mean that the triggering is also linked with the gravitational pulls of the sun and the moon.

I myself would agree that the sun and moon gravities are involved. However I feel that the triggering process might be linked with bending, stretching, and compression processes in the fault zone rather than directly with ocean water weight. One of the differences would be that if my theory is correct then those earthquakes are also being triggered there when there are “high tide” crests in the area instead of just low tide troughs. And I suspect that a statistical analysis of those 400 earthquakes might show that that is in fact the case.

I have obtained some of the original data used in preparing that report, specifically the earthquake occurrence time data which went into Figure 4A. It plots ocean water pressure versus time. And the earthquake times appear on the plot as “X” marks. You can easily see with your own eyes from examining that plot that a good percentage of the earthquakes occurred at about the time when the water pressure in the area was at a low point.

I have been running those earthquake times through my own data processing programs and at the moment have completed the calculations for about 200 of them. The goal is to compare my own data with those in the publication. So far the results look interesting and appear to be in agreement with my personal opinion regarding the data processing procedures which I myself am using.

Basically, I like the data in the publication more than my own. They are much easier to interpret. But I do not believe that those types of data cannot be very easily used to forecast earthquakes. Mine can be. I believe that the data in the publication and my own also support my proposal that it is important that a computer program be developed which takes into account both ocean and Solid Earth Tide types of data and other appropriate types of data and shows how fault zones around the world are being bent, stretched, and compressed at any given point in time.

When that data comparison process is completed and if time permits I plan to try to post another report here discussing its results.

EARTHQUAKE FORECASTING COMPUTER PROGRAM

In a number of notes posted here I proposed that it might be helpful if a computer program were developed which would make it possible to automatically compare certain types of earthquake precursor data such as “ear tone” occurrence times with similar data for past earthquakes. I have now written such a program. It is presently in its third generation but still lacks the sophistication which it would need in order to work with maximum effectiveness. However, the basic shell now exists. It generates useful data. And I plan to gradually add routines to it to get it to work better.

That latest generation program looks like it will work for an application which I was not really considering when I was developing it. Nice things like that happen now and then.

If government officials in some country or state such as California were concerned that an earthquake might be about to occur somewhere in the area then I could instruct the program to compare data linked with warning signals detected during the past few months with the earthquakes for that area which I have stored in my (presently rather limited) database. The program would then assign something like a probability number to each of those past earthquakes. And in theory those numbers might then indicate where the expected earthquake was most likely to occur. In doing that the program uses real warning signal data such as ear tone times (my own). It does not involve statistical projections based on earthquake patterns although I personally feel that such statistical projections might work quite well and that programs for generating them should be developed as quickly as possible. I am aware of the one which researchers at a Colorado university are supposed to have developed. There are probably others out there.

TORNADO FORECASTING

Other types of warning signals were detected in the past as much as 5 days before destructive tornados occurred. And during the past few years I stated that in my e-mail reports which were sent to tornado researchers and in some of my Newsgroup reports. However, I was never able to formulate a theory which matched my data and proposed how those signals could be generated days before the tornados occurred. I recently formulated such a theory. And I plan to discuss it in an e-mail report which will be sent to tornado forecasters and also posted to weather related Internet Newsgroups.

The tornado formation process in that theory has to do with geomagnetic storms, something which a number of other researchers have probably proposed in the past. But this latest theory outlines a different geomagnetic storm – atmospheric storm interaction process than what I believe other researchers have suggested might be taking place.