Two more steps have now been completed
Posted by EQF on May 13, 2003 at 17:31:53:

This effort involves creating charts which make it possible to easily compare earthquake occurrence and precursor signal detection times with sun and moon gravitational and Solid Earth Tide data etc.

(1) I have begun adding sun and moon latitude data to those charts. And I was not certain if I was interpreting those data correctly. They appeared to me to be saying that the moon moves once each month between about 25N down to 25S, and then back up to 25N again. But I thought that one report that I read might be stating that its actual travel range is more like 5 latitude degrees.

Some expert opinions were collected. And it appears that it does in fact travel over that larger latitude range.

These was an unexpected surprise in those data. I asked people what the maximum and minimum range values were and was informed that the moon actually travels as far north and south as 28 degrees at some times and 18 degrees at other times. I was not expecting that but checked my own data for a decade period of time and could see that the variation is in fact that much.

One reason I feel that that information is significant is because if it is assumed that gravitational forces are involved with earthquake triggering processes, then that variation means that the gravity force angle pattern is never truly repetitive. And it would probably not be possible for the earthquakes to reach any type of equilibrium condition where you had so many occurring here or there during a certain period of time.

(2) My charts are based on one data point per day. But some of my data such as the Solid Earth Tide data were irregular. They might have 3 data points in 4 days. And that has been making it difficult to create charts. Multiple charts had to be prepared and superimposed on one another. And then the time axis for the shorter chart was stretched by the chart drawing program so that it matched the longer time axis chart. When that procedure is used it can be difficult to do things such as change the chart size. My "group" command worked for only one chart axis.

A calculation routine was created which can convert say 4500 data points into 5000 data points. And as usual, nothing involved with this work is ever easy. It took a long time to get running, And even then it takes a long time to use. But it was worth the effort. All of my chart data now have the same time axis.

Data stretching routines like that one can and do create errors. But in this case there are so many data points and the chart resolution is sufficiently low that the errors are insignificant.