Southern California Four Cities Forecast, November 1, 2011
Here we give an earthquake forecast for the four southern California cities of Los Angeles, Riverside, Palm Springs and San Diego. These forecasts are for large earthquakes having magnitudes M>6 within a 100 mile radius of those cities, occurring within the next 12 months. A previous post gave earthquake forecasts for the 4 northern California cities of San Francisco, Berkeley, San Jose and Sacramento.
The blue dots and vertical blue lines indicate similar M>6 earthquakes that occurred previously. The plots show earthquake probabilities (chance of an earthquake in %) as a function of time in years. The large X at the right hand end indicates the chance of such an earthquake today. It can be seen that the largest current probability is for Palm Springs, nearly 45%. Riverside and San Diego have probabilities near 40%, while Los Angeles has a smaller probability, about 25%.
About OpenHazards Bloggers
Steven Ward is a Research Geophysicist at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, UC Santa Cruz. He specializes in the quantification and simulation of natural hazards. Read Steve's blog.
John Rundle is a Distinguished Professor of Physics and Geology at UC Davis and the Executive Director of the APEC Collaboration for Earthquake Simulations. He chaired the Board of Advisors for the Southern California Earthquake Center from 1994 to 1996. Read John's blog.