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Alerting for imminent earthquakes

Forecasting the occurrence of earthquakes, particularly of high magnitude (≥5), is a notoriously difficult problem (Nat. Comput. Sci. 3, 115; 2023). Often, scholars devote their efforts to detect and make use of possible signals that may warn of an impending earthquake — such as surface deformations prior to a shock — but observing and collecting data about these signals can be time-consuming and laborious. Recent developments in geodetic techniques, however, have enabled real-time and millimeter-scale monitoring of the movements of the Earth’s surface, which generates high-dimensional spatial geodetic time-series data in a timely and robust manner that could be used to improve the accuracy of earthquake-warning systems. In a recent work, Pei Chen, Rui Liu, Luonan Chen and colleagues leverage this data and a reservoir computing framework to generate a model-free method that is capable of alerting for possible catastrophic seismic events with better performance than previous methods, suggesting its potential for practical real-time early warning of high-magnitude earthquakes.

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  1. Nature Computational Science https://www.nature.com/natcomputsci/

    Fernando Chirigati

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Chirigati, F. Alerting for imminent earthquakes.
Nat Comput Sci (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-023-00545-9

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  • Published: 16 October 2023

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-023-00545-9

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