Reverse Tracing of Precursors Applied to the Annual Earthquake Forecast: Retrospective Test of the Annual Consultation in the Sichuan-Yunnan Region of Southwest China

An Annual Consultation on the Likelihood of Earthquakes is regularly undertaken in continental China. It is a special kind of intermediate-term medium-range earthquake forecast and a practical service provided by seismological communities within the capability of modern seismology. One of the problems the Annual Consultation encounters is its false alarm rate, which has been higher than expected and has caused numerous controversies on the methodology and significance of the Annual Consultation. To tackle this problem we use the concept of reverse tracing of precursors (RTP) to analyze the long-term seismic activity in the alarm regions, or regions thought to have increased probability of earthquakes, as identified by the Annual Consultation. We apply the Pattern Informatics (PI) and relative intensity (RI) algorithms to the long-term estimation of seismic hazard in the RTP analysis. A retrospective study of the Sichuan-Yunnan region of southwest China, using the data from 1990 to 2003, shows that, by choosing the threshold proportion of overlapped areas between the long-term estimates and the Annual Consultation, the RTP analysis can correctly remove some of the false-alarm regions from the “black list’ and thus reduce the false-alarm rate of the Annual Consultation, without reducing the hit rate. Remarkably, the RTP approach, although originally proposed for short-term earthquake predictions, seems able to contribute to the Annual Consultation as well.