Hi Don. I thought that I prepared the files at my Web sites in such a manner that they could be understood by most people who have at least some background in science. And I cannot understand what the problem is here. So far, only one international authority on earthquake forecasting has indicated to me that he understands how my forecasting program works. And I gather that he immediately understood the material. Additionally, I have explained how it works in the past in notes posted to this bulletin board. But, I will try once again.

The following is an extremely simplified version. But it should be adequate.

Occurrence times for many earthquakes are being controlled by the same processes that control the times when the types of warning signals listed at my Web sites are generated. And those processes are linked both directly and indirectly to the positions of the sun and the moon in the sky through their gravitational pulls on the Earth’s crust.

For a highly simplified example, if you detect a warning signal such as an Ear Tone when the moon is directly above 30W longitude then the approaching earthquake responsible for that signal may occur at some future time when the moon is once again directly above 30W longitude. And as it turns out, this is a reproducible process to some extent. To determine where the approaching earthquake is going to occur you can look at past earthquake records and see which ones occurred when the moon was above 30W longitude. The approaching earthquake may occur near where one of those earlier ones occurred.

Unfortunately, when you get to “real life” applications for that forecasting procedure the picture is not so simple. You need to factor in the position of the sun as well. And ocean tides and the Solid Earth Tide make their own contributions to the general picture. The result is a situation where a certain percentage of the earthquakes are easy to forecast. And from there you have to use increasingly complex filtering procedures in order to determine where the earthquake might be about to occur. The latest computer program that I developed to help with that contains more than 6000 lines of code, each of which I prepared myself. And it is presently only able to simply organize the data so that I can work with them. As you can see from my Web site data files there are more than a dozen numbers associated with each warning signal and earthquake. And when you are looking at records for nearly 2000 earthquakes and warning signals as I do when I generate a forecast, without that type of organizing program the work becomes nearly impossible, there are so many numbers to evaluate.

If you want proof that this procedures works then just keep watching the data at my Web site. If I have time to keep storing data there then you will see earthquakes occur which have numbers which match the warning signal which were listed there long before the earthquake occurred.

Because that forecasting process is presently so complex it can take as much as two days time for me to evaluate a group of warning signals and generate and circulate a single forecast. For that reason I am presently circulating them on only rare occasions. But I am planning to try to discuss my Web site data in notes posted here when those warning signals do match a significant earthquake.

I was hoping to create some automated routines at the Web site which would make it possible for people to use a data entry screen to submit their Ear Tone times etc. to a CGI program which would generate numbers which they could then compare with the earthquakes listed there. They would be the only people seeing their Ear Tone numbers. I would not know what they were. However it looks like it will be a while before those routines are available if they do ever become available. In the mean time, interested parties can send me their Ear Tone UTC occurrence dates and times if they wish. And as time permits I will try to do the calculations manually and send them back the numbers.

There are presently no geologists, seismologists, or geophysicists out there who know how to do this type of work as far as I can tell. So you can ask as many as you wish and they are not going to be able to provide you with any type of accurate opinion regarding the subject matter.