Hi All,

Though I have never been privvy to seeing the data Don received I do know he worked really hard to get some extra information before he posted his predictions. He really looked seriously at the catalogs to try and fix a magnitude on those upcoming quakes and did a fine job in delivering those predictions.

There were a sufficient number of hits which they would call AAAA, to be far above random chance and fortunately, he followed the exact requirements in providing them. Even in the cases where he might not have gotten a AAAA, his miss ratio was exceedingly low. Anyone who wishes to read the archives here can scoop them out and find out for themselves how good they were.

Don is rather the unsung hero in this attempt and though he has no real connection to geoForecaster, he did do some of the groundwork to demonstrate in this public forum that the method does work. I hope at least those who followed his work when he was providing the forecasts will recall that it was superior to anything else that has been posted here at any time.

This was an entirely free effort with no compensation to him what-so-ever. He was strickly a volunteer guinea pig and took the praise and the opposite throughout. So before some folks want to blast geoForecaster I think they should have a look at some of their track record through Don's spin on things.

And even more curious is that it was extremely rare for instruments which gathered data to show any changes until the earthquake had already happened, which lent little if any use to these forecasts. This is unfortunate. For those of us who look at the instrumental behavior frequently, more often than not, nothing happens when it looks promising, so to date, they are of little use in forecasting or predicting earthquakes.

I think it noteworthy to reiterate that solar storms do have an affect on retarding or accelerating earthquake activity. Anyone who has looked at the solar reports daily should be able to see that when the solar flares are active, so is earthquake activity, but when the kp index is up, most of the activity is in the volcanic area's, and little of it as well. It does not take M or X class flares to accelerate quakes as it can be a series of C's in a row which will do the same. It is well worth watching because it repeats this behavior frequently.

Petra