Challenge for Roger – November 14, 2012

Hi Roger,

You appear to be most interested in doing statistical work that looks at correlations between things such as tides and earthquake occurrence times. So, I am going to discuss a project that you might want to work on.

It involves generating data related to those relationships and then making them available for people around the world to examine. Now that the November 6, election is over I should be able to find some free time for creating a Web page for that. And I could store the data there. You could collect any data that are already available on the Web and generate new data as needed.

The Etdprog.exe earthquake forecasting program, Excel or some other spreadsheet program, TrueBasic, and other programs can be used to generate new data. I should have the first newly expanded version of Etdprog available by Thursday, tomorrow. It presently has the ability to generate and display a variety of precursor data, earthquake data, sun and moon position data, and limited amounts of ocean and Solid Earth Tide data for the time period of January 1, 1990 to the present.

The next expansion of the program should provide it with the ability to generate a wider variety of ocean and Solid Earth Tide data plus Ring Map data etc.

The old WaveChart program was able to do much of that. But it ran out of the preprocessed data that it relied on back in 2009. The EPmap program can do some of those things. But the program was being written with TrueBasic. And that programming effort ran out of steam. The newer version of Etdprog can generate those types of data as needed using computer programs. And I can add whatever Perl language code is needed for new features.

I also have two sun and moon position – earthquake occurrence times comparison studies from another researcher that I can display on the Web site. With one of them I can't even understand what the data are saying. And I am not sure that the person who generated the data understands that either. But, his charts look nice.

GETTING STARTED

Perhaps the first thing to do if you are interested in such a project would might be to do an Internet search for Web sites and reports that already contain information on sun and moon position and ocean tide related effects on earthquake triggering processes. I think that it is likely that there are a number of them out there. But I don’t think that people have really done too much research in this area so far.

There are charts that can be easily generated showing correlations between earthquake magnitude and the positions of the sun and the moon when the earthquake occurred.

And we could even create a chart that compares earthquake magnitude with the years when nuclear tests were being conducted around the world.

I did a study on that myself a number of years ago and seem to remember that I found that when the nuclear tests were being conducted, they appeared to have a limiting effect on earthquake magnitudes. If so then it could be that shock waves from the tests might have been causing the really powerful earthquakes to occur months or years before they might otherwise have occurred. So, there were few or no extremely high magnitude earthquakes during the decades while the tests were being conducted. It would be interesting to recheck those data and see if that was actually the case.