At the Santa Fe Institute Business Network I met John B. Rundle, UC Davis, Director of Center for Computational Science and Engineering who pointed me to OpenHazards web site that provides earthquake forecasting and hazard analysis. Just enter in a location, radius, and time horizon. It is easy to get a % of a greater than 5.0 earthquake.
Here is background on the Open Hazards Group
The Open Hazards Group
Open Hazards is a group of scientists, technologists, and business people dedicated to the proposition that, through advances in forecasting and sensor technology, as well as an open, web-based approach to public information availability and sharing, we can enable a more sustainable human society in the face of severe, recurring natural disasters.
The objective of this web site is to inform and educate the public worldwide. We provide a free, open, and independent assessment of hazard and risk due to major earthquakes, using a self-consistent, global, validated methodology. The information displayed on our web site is based on the best available science and technology as determined by the professional, peer-reviewed literature, as well as our own judgments, informed by many years of professional practice at the highest levels of academia and government. Our forecasts and risk estimates allow members of the public world-wide to understand and address, for the first time, their space- and time-dependent risk from major damaging earthquakes.
Being open, the site has an xml API to allow web sites to interact with the OpenHazards.
GetEarthquakeProbability API
For a specified location, the GetEarthquakeProbability API returns:
The latitude and longitude of the location.
The current expected rate of earthquakes of specified magnitude over a specifiec time window.
The current exptected probability of experiencing at least one such earthquake.
The GetEarthquakeProbability Web Service is located at:
http://api.openhazards.com/GetEarthquakeProbability.xml.
How do you validate OpenHazard results?
How does OH validate its forecasts?
Open Hazards validates its forecasts using the same types of statistical testing that are used in the weather/climate/financial forecasting communities. These tests are used to determine resolution, the ability of a forecast to discriminate between alternative outcomes; reliability, whether the predicted frequency of events matches the observed frequency of events; and sharpness, whether events tend to occur at high forecast probabilities, and no events tend to occur at low forecast probabilities, in contrast to methods in which events tend to occur near average values of probability.
Why did OH choose this approach to validate its forecasts?
Open Hazards feels that it is best to use testing procedures that have become standardized by extensive use in other fields, rather than inventing new statistical tests whose uses and properties are not well understood.