SCEC Award Number 25342 View PDF
Proposal Category Community Workshop
Proposal Title CSEP Workshop: Physics-Based Earthquake Forecasting
Investigator(s)
Name Organization
Maximilian Werner University of Bristol (United Kingdom) Francesco Serafini University of Bristol (United Kingdom) Philip Maechling University of Southern California
SCEC Milestones D2-2, C1,2,3-1, D1-1 SCEC Groups EFP, Seismology, RC
Report Due Date 02/20/2026 Date Report Submitted 02/25/2026
Project Abstract
 We had requested funds for a one-day workshop before the SCEC annual meeting to stimulate the development and evaluation of physics-based earthquake forecasting along the entire San Andreas plate boundary system. Given international travel limitations, we held a small planning/convening workshop in-person at the 2025 SCEC annual meeting, and unfortunately have not yet been able to hold the planned follow-up community workshop, either in-person or virtually. Challenges included international travel limitations, resources for international participants considered key for this workshop), coordinating across time zones spanning 21 hours and different leave calendars across hemispheres. This report summarises the planning workshop activities and recent progress of the CSEP community.
Intellectual Merit The workshop contributes to SCEC’s goal of advancing the predictability of earth-quakes by rigorous testing of models and developing new and improved models. One example of innovation involves the development of new methods to evaluate simulation-based forecasting models.
Broader Impacts CSEP actively promotes open research principles amongst the community, includ-ing the publication of reproducibility packages and open-source community-developed software along with training workshops and online and in-person tutori-als. These efforts have broadened the participant base and elevated the field’s ri-gor. CSEP’s forecast model evaluations provide independent assessments of the kinds of models that international and US government agencies use for public fore-casting, thereby building objective confidence in their predictive skills and exposing limitations.
Project Participants The core CSEP group currently involves scientists from the University of Bristol, GFZ Potsdam, SCEC, ETH Zurich and GNS Science (now called Earth Sciences New Zealand). The planning workshop also included researchers from UCLA and the USGS. The workshop was attended by about 15 attendees, including M Werner, F Serafini, L Vazquez, A Gabriel, M Page, N Field, K Milner, T Jordan, A ELbanna, P Maechling, R Schoenberg and others.
Exemplary Figure Figure 1: Spatio-temporal evolution of a synthetic UCERF3-ETAS catalog with multiple finite ruptures for 5 April 2010, the day after the 2010 El Mayor Cucapah earthquake. Points with the same color have the same parent. The parent and offspring are color-coded to identify 4 generations. Point size is proportional to magnitude and triangles rep-resent finite ruptures [taken from Serafini et al., 2026, in preparation].
Linked Publications

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