The Medium-to-Short-Term Earthquake Predictions in China and Their Evaluations Based on the R-Score

The earthquake tendency consultations in China, which have been carried out by the China Earthquake Administration for more than 40 yr, are really forward prediction of earthquakes. The results, experiences, and data accumulation are valuable for seismic researches. In this article, the annual, monthly, and weekly predictions produced by the regular earthquake tendency consultations and the rapid postearthquake tendency prediction derived from the irregular ones are presented systematically. In the regular predictions, the areas where earthquakes tend to occur are identified by specific space–time windows. To evaluate the efficiency of the predictions, we apply the R-score method to all the medium-to-short-term efforts. The R-score has been used as a routine tool to test annual predictions in China, in which the hit rate and the percentage of spatial alarms over the whole territory are taken into consideration. Results show that the annual R-scores, during the period of 1990–2020, increased gradually, with the average of 0.293. The examples in 2018 indicate that a considerable proportion of earthquakes with the Ms 5.0 and above were detected by the annual prediction; some earthquakes were detected by the monthly prediction, whereas just only a few earthquakes could be detected by the weekly prediction. The corresponding R-scores are 0.46, 0.11, and 0.002, decreasing obviously with reduction of the prediction time windows, and the smallest one, which is very close to zero, may suggest the minimum time scale for an effective earthquake prediction. We also evaluated efficiency of the irregular predictions by analyzing the practices of 29 Ms≥5.0 earthquakes since January 2019 and found that it is highly possible to do rapid postearthquake tendency prediction in China.

Time heals all wounds: analysis of changes in temporal focus and implicit space–time mappings among survivors of the 2019 China earthquake over time

abstract Accumulating evidence suggests that people’s sense of the spatial location of events in time is flexible across cultures, contexts, and individuals. Yet few studies have established whether time spatialization is correlated with traumatic experiences. Based on findings that people tend to demonstrate a past time orientation when suffering from disasters, the present research investigated how earthquake experience is associated with temporal focus and time spatialization. Study 1 compared responses of residents in an earthquake-hit area with those of residents in a non-disaster area about two weeks after the disaster had occurred. The results showed that participants in the disaster area were more past-focused and produced more past-in-front responses than participants in the non-disaster area. In Study 2, a follow-up survey was conducted in the same areas ten months after the earthquake to examine whether the impact of disasters on spatial conceptions of time would decay as time elapsed. The findings indicated that participants in these two areas showed no differences in temporal focus and implicit space–time mappings. Taken together, these findings provide support for the Temporal Focus Hypothesis. They also have implications for understanding fluctuation in temporal focus and the high malleability of temporal mappings across individuals.

China Earthquake Administration: Chinese Seismic Network

Guanghui Dai and Yanru An report on the Chinese Seismic Network for the Summary of the Bulletin of the ISC.