UCLA quake predictor weighs in on Italy temblor

There has been much debate about an Italian scientist's prediction of a quake in Italy several days before one occurred near Rome. The scientist said changes in gas levels from the earth's crust suggest a quake was coming -- a method that other experts say has been discredited.

Among the scientists voicing some skepticism about Giampaolo Giuliani’s claims was Vladimir Keilis-Borok, a professor in residence at UCLA’s Department of Earth and Space Sciences.

 “Certainly such announcements should be accompanied by the track record,” Keilis-Borok said. “You have to tell how you monitored radon for so many years and say, ‘I made so many correct predictions and so many false alarms.’ Without this information I cannot judge how he did.”

Indeed, this is the way earthquake scientists have judged Keilis-Borok, who became a sensation when he predicted -- in a general way -- a quake off the coast of Hokkaido, Japan, and the San Simeon earthquake in 2003.

The UCLA professor lost some of his star power when an earthquake predicted for the Southern California desert by September 2004 failed to materialize. “I made for California two predictions,” he said. “One was correct and the second was wrong.

"Each time we indicated the probability of false alarm was 50% so I would say that experiment was successful,” he said. He hasn’t given up on his approach, which looks at “precursory chains” of small quakes that had occurred in the past to develop predictions about larger quakes that would occur in the future. He said that his method had predicted 10 out of 14 earthquakes of magnitude 8 or greater worldwide.

Collaborators in Italy have made a few recent predictions in their country, Keilis-Borok said. But he acknowledged that, as far as predicting Monday's temblor, one was a “failure to predict” and the other was a “near miss.”

“Prediction is going to have limited accuracy,” he said. “It’s like military intelligence. Any meaningful improvement of knowledge is important.”

-- Jia-Rui Chong

Comments

[Jan turetsky]

Predictions should not be ignored because they do not meet current scientific standards. An intelligent policy for the media to take might be to publish the prediction and add a tail or post-statement that the prediction has been criticized by whatever bodies have criticized the method used.

[tom]

i think because the after shocks are sometimes deeper than the first event that we may have another one coming while the over all energy is going down there are some deep events that do not fit current theory for this to be a single event this seems like a two parter

http://www.iris.edu/seismon/zoom/events/?lon=13.46&lat=42.68

DATE ------LAT------LON ------MAG ---- DEPTH---REGION
13-APR-2009 21:14:26 42.68 13.46 4.6 5.0 CENTRAL ITALY
10-APR-2009 03:22:23 42.48 13.38 4.0 5.0 CENTRAL ITALY
09-APR-2009 19:38:18 42.52 13.30 5.0 10.0 CENTRAL ITALY
09-APR-2009 04:32:46 42.51 13.31 4.2 5.0 CENTRAL ITALY
09-APR-2009 03:14:52 42.41 13.44 4.3 5.0 CENTRAL ITALY
09-APR-2009 00:53:00 42.51 13.33 5.3 5.0 CENTRAL ITALY
07-APR-2009 21:34:32 42.49 13.40 4.6 5.0 CENTRAL ITALY
07-APR-2009 17:47:38 42.35 13.41 5.6 13.1 CENTRAL ITALY
07-APR-2009 09:26:30 42.34 13.36 4.9 10.0 CENTRAL ITALY
06-APR-2009 23:15:37 42.47 13.39 4.9 2.0 CENTRAL ITALY
06-APR-2009 07:17:13 42.45 13.36 4.3 10.0 CENTRAL ITALY
06-APR-2009 03:56:48 42.39 13.32 4.4 10.0 CENTRAL ITALY
06-APR-2009 02:37:04 42.37 13.34 4.6 10.1 CENTRAL ITALY
06-APR-2009 01:32:42 42.42 13.39 6.3 10.0 CENTRAL ITALY
05-APR-2009 20:48:57 42.40 13.41 4.0 10.0 CENTRAL ITALY
05-APR-2009 20:20:52 44.36 11.98 4.6 6.4 NORTHERN ITALY

[tom]

http://www.iris.edu/seismon/ i was right on this one their is a second event it seems to be a swarm with Italy in the center but i will admit am claiming to be right a bit to early but we will know for sure in a few days or weeks i would call this a false alarm in about 6 weeks but to be creditable i must post my interruption of the data before it happens