Thanks, Chris. Your calculation seems to support my skepticism. If I accept that quakes can be triggered by "static stress changes of a bar or less," which I'm not sure I do, an extremely heavy rainfall (say, 1 meter or 39"), would add one tenth of a bar. That is an increase of a little over 3 thousandths of one percent. Maybe that guy over at SGE who keeps suggesting dropping a heavy weight from a height to trigger quakes is onto something!

I'm not at all sure whether the amount of stress released by a quake, "less that 100 bars," is relevant to the discussion of whether rainfall could be a triggering mechanism.

And thanks for suggesting that I look for a correlation myself. There is so much information out there that is free for the taking, produced mostly by people who are hoping to be compensated for their time with money or fame (quite reasonably), that I am more likely to just move on to another subject!

Mike Williams