Roger,

As I stated in the second post in this thread, the forecaster(s) said that the expected area was roughly within a 250 km radius of a certain latitude and longitude. That sounds fairly exact to me. If I were living in a reasonably small area like that I would certainly like to know if an earthquake were approaching for anywhere in that area.

Additionally, once you can focus in on an area like that and know the Time Window as he (or she or they) did, you might then be able to use other precursor detection methods such as fresh, large cracks in building foundations to narrow the area down. Wilderness and to some extent farming areas inside that original area could be largely ignored.

But, this brings up another important point. And I have strongly complained about this in the past in my posts here.

Most of the people in the international earthquake forecasting community appear to me to be among the most disorganized group of researchers on the planet. They might generate an amazingly accurate forecast like that one. Then they completely disappear and I might not hear from them again for months.

There are certain things about my own forecasting method that I keep confidential for important reasons. But at least I am willing to communicate with most other researchers when I generate a forecast etc. and if necessary state, “This or that information is confidential.”

One of the problems is that the forecasters are often afraid of getting criticized in public. So they generate some information and then disappear.

Another reason is that in some cases the forecasters want to keep their technology confidential so that they have the patent and publication rights. But they don’t have to just disappear in order to do that. They could just say like I do, “That information is confidential.”

And a third problem is that they often are 100% researchers and mostly 0% disaster mitigation workers. In contrast I myself am largely a disaster mitigation worker and partially a researcher.

The difference is that the goal of the researchers is to do research and publish papers etc. And the goal of the disaster mitigation workers is to keep disasters from occurring in the first place or at least help people prepare for them and deal with the consequences once they have occurred.

So, if you just want to publish papers then you can afford to disappear whenever you wish. And you can still accomplish your goal.

On the other hand, if your goal is to be a disaster mitigation worker then if you disappear and keep quiet about something like an earthquake forecast the disaster will occur for certain without anyone knowing about it or being prepared for it. And you will have failed with your basic goal.

Trying to work with these people (other earthquake forecasters), even the best of them, has to be one of the most frustrating things on the planet. They just seem to disappear and refuse to communicate whenever someone starts asking for details.

I have a request that I sent to that TEC researcher(s) for more information such as the TEC detection method used so that I can circulate more details. But I haven’t heard a thing. And Dr. Kalenda is generally fairly good with communications. But even he answers only a fraction of the requests sent to him for details. One reason is that he apparently travels around a lot. But that should not stop him from answering repeated E-mails. Soon or later, he has to see at least one of them.

Shan is one notable exception. It has been my experience that he almost always responds to requests for information.

Finally, if you are a professional disaster mitigation worker as I am, you learn sooner or later to make the best use of whatever information is available. The goal is to save lives after all, not drag information out of other people.