Mapping and Analysis Tools
A variety of analysis tools exist to help communities visualize and understand their earthquake risk. The links below take you to more information for each.
- Earthquake Scenario Publications from California Geological Survey
- The California Geological Survey (CGS) has published nine earthquake scenarios in the past 26 years for major faults throughout the state. The reports examine the possible destruction that could be caused from large earthquakes along these faults.
- HAZUS-MH is a powerful risk assessment methodology for analyzing potential losses from floods, hurricane winds and earthquakes. In HAZUS-MH, current scientific and engineering knowledge is coupled with the latest geographic information systems (GIS) technology to produce estimates of hazard-related damage before, or after, a disaster occurs.
- ShakeMaps/Atlas of ShakeMaps
- ShakeMap sites provide near-real-time maps of ground motion and shaking intensity following significant earthquakes. These maps are used by federal, state, and local organizations, both public and private, for post-earthquake response and recovery, public and scientific information, as well as for preparedness exercises and disaster planning.
- Open SHA
- The primary goal of OpenSHA is to improve Seismic Hazard Analysis by providing a platform that can accommodate both past and future models. To this end, OpenSHA is object-oriented, web- & GUI-enabled, open-source, and freely available. The goal is to provide a framework where any arbitrarily complex (e.g., physics based) Earthquake Rupture Forecast, ground-motion model, or engineering-response model can “plug in” for analysis without having to change what’s being plugged into.
- An application for automating ShakeMap delivery to critical users and for facilitating notification of shaking levels at user-selected facilities.
- The PAGER system provides estimates of the number of people and the names of cities exposed to severe shaking following significant earthquakes worldwide.
- California Integrated Seismic Network
- The California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) operates a reliable, modern, statewide system for earthquake monitoring, research, archiving, and distribution of information for the benefit of public safety, emergency response, and loss mitigation. Further, the CISN seeks to mitigate the impact of future earthquakes by collecting, processing, and disseminating critical earthquake information in a timely way.
- This open-source, seismic loss-assessment software integrates spatial information, data, and visual information into an environment for performing seismic loss assessment and analysis. It can be used to generate damage estimates from scientific and engineering principles, test multiple mitigation strategies, and support modeling efforts to estimate higher level impacts of earthquake hazards, such as impacts on transportation networks, social, or economic systems. MAEviz is the result a joint effort between the Mid-America Earthquake (MAE) Center and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
To help understand how you can use some of these tools, look at the following presentations from the 2008 workshop on developing earthquake scenarios: