From model development to co-designing user-centered earthquake forecasts

Enhancing societies’ resilience is crucial for saving lives and mitigating losses caused by significant earthquakes. Earthquake forecasting offers an opportunity to inform societies – professionals and the general public – about the probability of earthquakes of certain magnitudes to occur. Particularly following a severe earthquake, earthquake forecasts (in this special case sometimes called aftershock forecasts) play a pivotal role in addressing the common question "What comes next?" posed by various stakeholders, including the media, the public, regional and national authorities. Earthquake forecasts allow to respond quantitatively to this question. Nevertheless, understanding how stakeholders utilize the often very low probabilities of future large earthquakes needs further research to ensure accurate interpretation and effective implementation of the provided forecasts.

At the conference, we will present the procedure applied by the Swiss Seismological Service at ETH Zurich in developing and validating the forecasting model, as well as the co-creation and testing of communication materials. In essence, our approach involved conducting an expert elicitation to understand common practices, fostering an international network for continuous knowledge exchange. In parallel, we began formulating and testing the earthquake forecast model tailored to Switzerland and started assessing the needs of Swiss end users. Our ongoing efforts involve designing forecast products intended for duty seismologists, enabling them to respond promptly to media inquiries and to public requests. We also test these products and more simplified prototypes with authorities and the public, providing for instance insights into the likely evolution of an earthquake sequence.

Some first insights from the international expert elicitation are that (i) societal stakeholders need support in interpreting the forecasts; (ii) scenarios are a common way to communicate earthquake forecasts; (iii) ideally, earthquake forecasts would be permanently communicated to society; (iv) information needs do not vary significantly between the different stakeholders; and (v) the way earthquake forecasts are communicated to society should be tested and co-designed with the intended users. Regarding the latter, stay tuned for the conference where we present the techniques and methods we have been using for the stakeholder testing in Switzerland.

This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement Number 101021746, sCience and human factOr for Resilient sociEty (CORE), and the Swiss Seismological Service at ETH Zurich.