nisarachmatika / sumatera-andaman-earthquake-forecasting

Forecasting of Sumatera Andaman Earthquake (1973-2012)

Sumatera-Andaman-Earthquake-Forecasting (1973-2012)

Description

Sumatra region in Indonesia is prone to earthquakes because it lies at the boundary of two of Earth's tectonic plates. However, there was no indication that this region will have large earthquake until December 26, 2004, when the magnitude 9.1 earthquake struck this area and killed over 200,000 people. Since then, scientists tried to estimate when the next big earthquake will occur in Sumatra and similar regions previously thought to be at low risk for large earthquakes, such as in China, Java, Japan, and Peru.

This report tried to forecast earthquake magnitudes in Sumatera Andaman area based on its earthquakes’ historical data from January 1973 to March 2012, using 9,573 earthquake observations. The earthquake dataset is obtained from United States Geological Survey (USGS) website.

The challenge of this forecasting is to find the pattern of earthquakes in this area, and use this pattern to predict next big earthquakes. To make things more complicated, most of earthquake data will contained small magnitudes earthquake, and we have to predict the next big earthquakes using this small earthquakes data,