If you want to play baseball there are certain rules that need to be followed. The same goes for earthquake forecasting in my opinion.

If you do this for long enough you eventually learn that one of the most important rules is:

“Try not to cause the general public to get unnecessarily upset.”

People whose public forecasts look completely ridiculous might get some casual viewers upset if the forecasts are highly specific regarding times, locations, and magnitudes. But they are generally ignored. If you are making a serious effort to generate forecast data then it is a good idea to be a little careful about what you say. And I generally try to circulate carefully worded public forecasts to keep people from getting unnecessarily upset.

As I have said on innumerable occasions in these notes, location data related to my forecasts are available in the Charts on my Data.html Web page along with explanations for how to interpret the data.

In the E-mail earthquake advisory notes that I circulate I am usually more specific regarding locations as the advisories are being sent to a limited number of researchers.