An Operational Earthquake Forecasting Experiment for Israel: Preliminary Results

Operational Earthquake Forecasting (OEF) aims to deliver timely and reliable forecasts that

may help to mitigate seismic risk during earthquake sequences. In this paper, we build the

first OEF system for the State of Israel, and we evaluate its reliability. This first version of the

OEF system is composed of one forecasting model, which is based on a stochastic

clustering Epidemic Type Earthquake Sequence (ETES) model. For every day of the

forecasting time period, January 1, 2016 - November 15, 2020, the OEF-Israel system

produces a weekly forecast for target earthquakes with local magnitudes greater than 4.0

and 5.5 in the entire State of Israel. Specifically, it provides space-time-dependent seismic

maps of the weekly probabilities, obtained by using a fixed set of the model’s parameters,

which are estimated through the maximumlikelihood technique based on a learning period

of about 32 years (1983–2015). According to the guidance proposed by the Collaboratory

for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP), we also perform the N- and S-statistical

tests to verify the reliability of the forecasts. Results show that the OEF system forecasts a

number of events comparable to the observed one, and also captures quite well the spatial

distribution of the real catalog with the exception of two target events that occurred in low

seismicity regions.