Organized by delphine ly, Nina Miolane, Zarinah Agnew

Do seismologists predict earthquakes? In fact, predicting the strength of shaking in future earthquakes is more important than predicting exactly when and where they will occur. That is because if we know how strong the ground will shake, buildings can be designed to withstand that shaking.

Predicting the strength of shaking is however challenging for seismologists because large earthquakes are rare (fortunately), and because we have only few on-scale recordings of strong ground shaking. For that reason, computer simulations are increasingly used to fill the data gap but many assumptions go into these simulations, and it’s important to test their accuracy.

In this talk, Zack Spica will present recent approaches used to predicting strong ground motion and discuss their implications.