The SCEC CSM v2024: a Statewide Community Model for Stress Orientation and Stressing Rate

Karen Luttrell, Elizabeth H. Hearn, & Jeanne L. Hardebeck

Submitted September 7, 2025, SCEC Contribution #14549, 2025 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #TBD

We announce the full release of the statewide SCEC Community Stress Model (CSM), v2024. One of the key priorities for the Statewide California Earthquake Center is improving observations and closing critical data gaps for the suite of Community Earth Models (CEM). Stress quantifies the fundamental forces that cause faults to slip and the ground to shake. Researchers use stress to describe how faults are loaded, how faults interact, and as initial conditions in ground motion simulations. This latest CSM consists of 22 distinct models of stress or stressing rate, each based on different types of data (e.g., focal mechanisms, borehole breakouts, geodetic data), methodologies (e.g., stress inversions, kinematic modeling), and underlying assumptions. We have added eight new models of stress orientation from earthquake focal mechanism inversion, including six distinct models covering regions of the San Andreas system in central or northern California, in addition to one covering parts of Long Valley, and one covering the Ridgecrest region. With these additions CSM v2024 stress orientation models now cover the full extent of the main San Andreas fault. We have also developed three new stressing rate models based on strain rate estimates incorporated into the latest National Seismic Hazard Model release, assuming a uniform elastic material. These models cover the entire land area of California, and two have stress accumulation estimates that extend offshore to the full extent of CSM model grid space. The entire CSM v2024 is available as an archive with a citable Digital Object Identifier (DOI) at Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/records/15171026). The new CSM contributions have also been incorporated into the revised web-based Explorer tool (https://central.scec.org/research/csm-explorer/), which allows easy exploration, basic visualization, and selective download of subsets of CSM models. A new CSM website (https://www.scec.org/science/community-stress-model/) serves as an introduction to the CSM for new and potential users, as well as contextualizing the CSM within the broader CEM project. We expect that expanding the range and accessibility of CSM models will both expand the user community and facilitate novel research avenues.

Key Words
CSM, stress, stressing rate

Citation
Luttrell, K., Hearn, E. H., & Hardebeck, J. L. (2025, 09). The SCEC CSM v2024: a Statewide Community Model for Stress Orientation and Stressing Rate. Poster Presentation at 2025 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Community Earth Models (CEM)