Beyond button pushing: Seismic risk assessment for California

The study analyses how different assumptions about the nature of the earthquake hazard (such as magnitude, location, or ground shaking potential) affect the estimates of impact from a given earthquake or the risk from all possible earthquakes.

The goal of the project is to show how important the quantification of uncertainty is in estimating and understanding California’s earthquake risk using OpenQuake — GEM Foundation’s state-of-the-art open source earthquake hazard and risk assessment software. With OpenQuake’s plug-and-play capabilities, expert users can individually select or substitute every model component, data, and assumption. This feature will help model users and decision makers to: 1) ‘ask the right questions’ when evaluating model results; 2) better interpret risk assessment results and gain trust in model results; and 3) make better risk management decisions.