Operational earthquake forecasting can enhance earthquake preparedness

We cannot yet predict large earthquakes in the short term with much reliability and skill, but the strong clustering exhibited in seismic sequences tells us that earthquake probabilities are not constant in time; they generally rise and fall over periods of days to years in correlation with nearby seismic activity. Opera- tional earthquake forecasting (OEF) is the dissemination of authoritative information about these time-dependent proba- bilities to help communities prepare for potentially destructive earthquakes. The goal of OEF is to inform the decisions that people and organizations must continually make to mitigate seismic risk and prepare for potentially destructive earthquakes on time scales from days to decades. To fulfill this role, OEF must provide a complete description of the seismic hazard—ground-motion exceedance probabilities as well as short-term rupture probabilities—in concert with the long-term forecasts of probabilistic seismic-hazard analysis (PSHA).