Hazard forecasting in real time: from controlled laboratory tests to volcanoes and earthquakes

The inherent predictability of brittle failure events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions is important, unknown, and much debated. Although a range of models have been proposed with the potential to provide forecasts for such events, few, if any, of these models have been properly evaluated.

Or project aims to:

1. Establish techniques to determine the forecasting power for brittle failure in the ideal case of controlled tests, using output data from a series of experiments designed to determine the rheology of rocks under slow deformation in a deep-sea laboratory. We will use recent developments in informatics to enable a capability for verifiably forecasting failure in prospective mode, i.e. before it has occurred. This is important because the benefit of hindsight provides a significant positive bias in evaluating the predictability in retrospective tests.


2. With the experience gained from the controlled laboratory environment, we will then apply similar techniques to natural systems to quantify the loss of predictability in an uncontrolled, more complex system at greater spatial and temporal scales.

We intend to focus on volcanic systems where seismicity and surface deformation are routinely measured and the links to the laboratory conditions (e.g. strain rate) are perhaps closest. A major technical aim of the project is to develop an open-access, automated, web-based platform for real-time data collation, analysis and information exchange, enabling competing physical hypotheses and statistical methods to be tested and developed in fully prospective mode in an open, testable environment comparable, say, to daily weather forecasts. This will require applying state-of-the art statistical methods to the data in a user-friendly, high-performance computing environment, including formal quantification of model uncertainties and their effect on forecast consistency and quality. To ensure that the resulting techniques are practicable and formally provide value for use in hazard planning and risk mitigation, they will be developed in collaboration with recent global earthquake forecasting initiatives, monitoring observatories and civil defence agencies responsible for issuing alerts on seismic and volcanic events. The results will improve our understanding of the physical processes controlling material failure in the laboratory and in the Earth, and will provide a sustainable, experience-based tool for rigorous and fully-probabilistic forecasting of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.

In collaboration with the School of Informatics , University of Edinburgh and the Rock and Ice Physics Laboratory, UCL.

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