Hi Roger,

I think that you might have the wrong impression regarding how my forecasting program works.

Something that I have said a number of times over the years is that I feel that a good, comprehensive earthquake forecasting program should be evaluating two fundamentally different types of data. The first would be statistical data such as the frequency of earthquakes occurring in some location over a long period of time. The second would be actual precursor signals which are generated in connection with fault zone activities prior to an earthquake.

My own program involves the detection of what I believe are fault zone activity related electromagnetic fluctuations. The signals can be detected at times for several months before an earthquake occurs. With regard to statistics and probability calculations, I have no way of directly determining where the signals came from. Triangulation might work if the necessary radio receiver equipment were available. But it is not, at least to me, at the moment. So, what I have done is develop some computer programs which compare the times when the signals are detected with the times that earthquakes occurred in the past. The comparisons are made with the nearly 40,000 earthquakes I have in my database going back to the beginning of 1990.

The programs then generate “probability” tables which indicate how well a signal time matched the earthquake times. Factors going into the probability calculations include the positions of the sun and the moon in the sky and the locations of ocean and Solid Earth Tide crests and troughs when the signals were detected and when the past earthquakes occurred. What the data tables on my Web page then display are some 50 to 100 past earthquakes which were the best matches with all of the signals detected during the last 3 months, averaged together. And they displays the best 50 to 100 matches with earthquakes in my database which produced at least one fatality.

This is an extremely rough procedure. None of the probability variables have been optimized. But it does produce some fairly accurate results. And it should be getting better with time.

Our governments or at least some scientific groups should in my opinion be performing those types of optimizations. They are not especially difficult. But they require fairly powerful computers. Starting from scratch it would probably take my personal computer about 2 weeks to do the calculations needed to generate a single probability table. To save most of that time I use some accelerating procedures. Some of the powerful government computers could do these calculations in a fraction of a second.

I actually have an organization running now which is supposed to get this type of research moving along. Unfortunately I have simply not had time to get it fully operational. Some time this next year I hope. You should like the project as it is supposed to make it possible for people around the world to develop earthquake forecasting and earthquake triggering process related computer programs and then share them with one another.