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QuakeSim in the News
QuakeSim on the ESTO website - Two NASA Earth Science Technology Projects team up to participate in the “Great Southern California ShakeOut”
QuakeSim in the Los Angeles Times - "Study finds troubling pattern of Southern California quakes"
A Little About the Award Winning GeoFEST 4.8
GeoFEST 4.8 is the third major advance registered as an New Technology Report. Prior versions of GeoFEST include the initial GeoFEST application ( 2002), which simulates elastic and viscoelastic deformation and strain with limited fault slip ability on a desktop computer, limited to about 100,000 finite elements (studies of a single earthquake fault and its immediate surroundings); and GeoFESTv.4.3(p) (2003), which has scalable parallel capability, using the Pyramid library for mesh partition and parallel communication, capable of solving problems with 10,000,000 finite elements on cluster computers with hundreds of processors (studies of a handful of interacting fault segments such as the Landers and Hector Mine earthquakes in the 1990s, Mojave Desert, California).
GeoFEST 4.8 has many important added features. GeoFEST now uses Pyramid library features to automatically perform parallel mesh refinement, using strain energy from a scratch solution on the initial coarse mesh to drive the refinement by subdivision of those regions of the mesh most in need of increased accuracy. This allows problems with at least 120,000,000 finite elements, sufficient for modeling a tectonic region such as southern California, including dozens of faults and material layers. The application is much easier to set up and run for large, accurate simulations. The user may set a refinement goal as a stated percentage of the initial elements; the application will mark and refine the elements with the greatest strain energy. The matrix solution convergence has been greatly improved for reliable, accurate solutions. Fault slip may be specified to a high degree of detail, including separate slip schedules for individual strands, and specified slip variation along the length of each fault. Buoyancy restoration forces are now included, and tectonic forcing at the domain boundaries is fully integrated into the parallel code. Many more detailed test cases have been used to validate the correctness of the algorithms, including elastic and viscoelastic conditions.
This means GeoFEST is now effective and convenient for performing regional simulations of earthquake stress transfer, deformation, and strain from immediate earthquake response, post-event relaxation and fault afterslip, and multiple-earthquake cycles. Such simulations are useful in developing and assessing seismic hazard and for enhancing scientific understanding of earthquakes and interactions of systems of earthquake faults, in conjunction with deformation data collection efforts. GeoFEST simulated deformation data compares directly with regional GPS network data and with differential InSAR observations.
GeoFEST has seen recent use in course material for CSU Northridge, undergraduate research at Harvey Mudd College, graduate research at Indiana University, UC Davis and Oregon State University. The JPL Tectonics Laboratory is using GeoFEST to simulate InSAR data observations of the Landers and Hector Mine relaxation process. The DESDynI project is considering use of GeoFEST for design studies and data interpretation. It is one of a handful of major crustal simulation applications used for validation studies and code comparisons at the annual Community Finite Element Model workshop, sponsored by the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics, the Southern California Earthquake Center, NSF and NASA.
What is QuakeSim?
QuakeSim is a project to develop a solid Earth science framework for modeling and understanding earthquake and tectonic processes. The multi-scale nature of earthquakes requires integrating many data types and models to fully simulate and understand the earthquake process. QuakeSim focuses on modeling the interseismic process through various boundary element, finite element, and analytic applications, which run on various platforms including desktop and high end computers.
We integrate and deliver the following data products through our QuakeTables database:
- paleoseismic fault data
- surface deformation data in the form of Global Positioning System (GPS) data
- seismicity data
- processed Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) interferograms from existing satellites (in progress)
Making these data available to modelers is leading to significant improvements in earthquake forecast quality and thereby mitigating the danger from this natural hazard.
QuakeSim is sponsored by the Earth Science Technology Office, in partnership with Goddard Space Flight Center, with the full participation of the related science and technology communities. NASA Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) develops technologies that enable a full range of scientific measurements, operational requirements, and practical applications that benefit society at large.
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The QuakeSim Portal allows users to access the QuakeTables database and ingest the data into various modeling and visualization applications. |
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Quaketables is a database that contains faults and their information for modeling in the QuakeSim environment. Simply enter a fault name, select "Search By Fault Name," and click "Go" to continue.
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For information on the latest QuakeSim related NASA mission please visit the DESDynI website. |
Also, see these links for more details about:
- the science objectives and rationale (pdf)
- the software engineering and development plan (pdf)
Visit our Youtube or Animations pages to watch exciting videos and animations.
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