Shannon Information Content of Earthquake Sequences:Application to Nowcasting and Forecasting

What is the information content of a sequence of earthquakes? In 1948 Claude Shannon described a method for understanding the quantity of information provided by a sequence of events derived from an alphabet of symbols. Shannon's statistical communication theory is now widely recognized as one of the fundamental discoveries of the 20^th century, and is the foundation for modern internet technology.

We have begun to apply Shannon's methods in an attempt to extract the information content of earthquake events. Clearly, both nowcasting and forecasting are techniques that try to understand the information content of earthquake sequences and the implication for future earthquakes. We note that nowcasting refers to the estimation of the current uncertain state of a dynamical system, whereas forecasting is a calculation of probabilities of future state(s). We have discussed these ideas in recent talks and papers.

In this talk we describe a new method for nowcasting and forecasting that incorporates some of the results of statistical communication theory. We describe preliminary results and discuss implications of future and ongoing research, particularly as it might apply to both great earthquakes and tsunamis.