Present reports are stating that those Iran earthquakes have now claimed at least 300 lives.

I don’t know if that Japan earthquake is what those other forecasting groups were expecting. The data collection process one group is using as described below is rather slow. Sooner or later I will probably hear from them.

One of the problems at the moment is that there are so many forecasting groups that are using so many different methods, it is virtually impossible to keep track of them. And a major difficulty arises from the fact that they don’t seem to be at all interested in communicating with one another. Often they simply dump information out on the Internet and expect that people will go searching for it. As far as I can tell, I myself am one of the most active people or groups around for circulating forecast data without waiting for people to locate it.

Those groups need to get better organized if they want to accomplish anything of value. The EPmap program that I was developing with Roger was intended to help get things organized. And it is still an active project. But it will likely be somewhere down a ways on the priority list until after next November’s elections.

One of the groups in Europe that appears to be having quite a bit of success, the group associated with that new book, uses ground movement sensors.

In rough terms, among other things these sensors involve a vertical pendulum that has photo sensors that monitor its position in horizontal directions. If the ground around a pendulum starts to tilt slightly because an approaching earthquake is causing the ground to shift, the pendulum will remain pointed towards the center of gravity below. And it will move a little closer to one of the photo sensors. That information is then sent back to the central laboratory and evaluated.

The sensor systems are usually positioned in locations such as old coal mines etc. that are far enough away from populated areas that they are not affected by truck traffic etc.

The sensor systems seem to be doing a fairly good job of detecting ground movement associated with approaching powerful earthquakes. And their data can be in stunningly good agreement with my own. This is surprising because on one hand the data are ground movement data collected in Europe and Asia. And on the other hand they are electromagnetic signal data being collected here in the U.S. But both point to sharp transitions in the data occurring at about the same time.

They had a difficult time with that extremely powerful 2011 Japan earthquake because of all of the “noise” they were detecting around then that was confusing their instrumentation. I am guessing that the noise was caused by various phenomena associated with the approaching earthquake.

As far as I am aware, that particular European group is not yet making its data available on the Internet. They do publish papers in various geology journals.