A geospatial analytical system for mapping global medium-term earthquake probabilities

The most widely used time interval for long-term earthquake forecast - the process of estimating the probability for a specific area to experience an earthquake of a given magnitude - is a 30-year time window. For earthquake hazards mitigation, it is desirable to shorten that time interval to a few years so that decision makers can allocate limited resources to high risk areas of large earthquakes with a more reasonable time frame in mind. Recent research findings suggest that information derived from high precision large scale gravity monitoring data may be used to make medium-term (5-year) forecast of large earthquakes. To automate the process of making medium-term earthquake forecast based on this approach, it is highly desirable to develop a system that can be used to process massive geographically-referenced data and map earthquake probabilities accordingly. This article presents a geospatial visual analytical system for mapping medium-term earthquake probabilities at a global scale.