Developing Visualizations of Earthquake Droughts on the San Andreas Fault System

Gina Yang, Joses Galdamez, Afe Addeh, Brandon O'Neil, Harsh Waghela, John Yu, Kevin R. Milner, Jerlyn L. Swiatlowski, & Thomas H. Jordan

Published August 1, 2019, SCEC Contribution #9311, 2019 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #308

New advances in seismic data collection and processing have highlighted the need for methods of earthquake and fault visualization packaged in interactive, user-friendly software. The Southern California Earthquake Center Virtual Display of Objects (SCEC-VDO) aims to fill this role; a software tool used for the 3-dimensional visualization of seismic data, it allows for not only the display of 3D earthquake locations and fault objects on maps, but also the creation and saving of images and movies for analysis, presentation, and publication. Written in Java and utilizing the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) to render 3D content, SCEC-VDO is developed and continually updated by UseIT interns each year.

California is currently experiencing an earthquake drought, meaning that no ground-rupturing earthquake has occurred on the principal faults of the San Andreas Fault (SAF) system in the past century. Using the data from simulated earthquake catalogs generated by RSQSim, a physics-based earthquake simulator, we developed SCEC-VDO capabilities to identify, visualize, and animate earthquake droughts along the SAF system given user-specified criteria such as drought length and minimum magnitude. In addition, we improved SCEC-VDO plugin interface consistency, its user manual with an update of its website and documentation, and overall software user friendliness with the implementation of loading screen overlays within some plugins. These changes will improve the accessibility of SCEC-VDO to potential users.

Citation
Yang, G., Galdamez, J., Addeh, A., O'Neil, B., Waghela, H., Yu, J., Milner, K. R., Swiatlowski, J. L., & Jordan, T. H. (2019, 08). Developing Visualizations of Earthquake Droughts on the San Andreas Fault System. Poster Presentation at 2019 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Communication, Education, and Outreach (CEO)