G22AC00070

Project Title: Southern California Earthquake Center

Bridge Proposal, 2022-2024

Actual Project Period: 2/1/2022 through 1/31/2024

Earthquakes are associated with fundamental unsolved scientific questions and substantial societal and economic importance. Improved understanding, forecasting, and preparation for earthquakes requires sustained coordinated efforts on many fronts.

The Southern California Earthquake Center conducts and coordinates fundamental and applied research on earthquakes that aims to be global in impact while using Southern California as a focused natural laboratory. Our collaboration develops dynamical models of earthquake processes that are comprehensive, integrative, verified, predictive, and validated against observations. The focus on validation of model-based predictions against data is key to guiding the assessment of uncertainties and driving models towards better representations of reality.

The Center's validation efforts tightly couple basic earthquake research to the practical needs of probabilistic seismic hazard analysis, operational earthquake forecasting, earthquake early warning, and rapid post-earthquake response. The risk reduction problem, which requires actions motivated by useful information, strongly couples validated science results to earthquake engineering.

This proposal will support Center activities for 2 years, focusing efforts by a multidisciplinary research community to develop improved models for earthquakes and seismic ground motion, provide new data for testing the models, and improve the understanding of uncertainties. The collaboration will pursue innovative and timely research to:

1. Develop workflows to integrate and validate existing and future community earth models with observational results.
2. Attempt to detect jointly in all community models possible underlying large-scale structures that have limited manifestations in each data set.
3. Update research on off-fault yielding from the use of (plasticity) to the more general descriptor of (damage), which includes changes of rock properties during failure.
4. Increase studies of dynamic dilation (volumetric effects) accompanying failure of fault zone materials.

Key innovations will include:
1. Increased use of machine learning in both computational and observational studies across the disciplinary spectrum of earthquake science.
2. Increased focus on near-fault studies for testing and developing models of earthquake processes.
3. Improvements to research computing, cyberinfrastructure, and information technology to support the planned science activities.

The Center will continue testing and validation of codes on key computational platforms, make improvements in simulations and validation of seismic ground motion to promote uptake by engineers, and continue development of physics-based earthquake simulators.

The Center establishes subawards annually for focused research studies through a competitive process. Over 100 proposals are submitted to the Center each year, involving work by 200 distinct investigators and many more students and early career scientists.

The Center also connects to the social sciences through its mission to convey authoritative information to stakeholders in ways that result in lowered risk and enhanced resilience. Our vision is to engage end-users and the public at large in ongoing, community-centric conversations about how to manage particular risks by taking specific actions. Our communication, education, and outreach program seeks to promote this dialogue on many levels, through many different channels, and to inform the conversations with authoritative earthquake information.

Towards this goal, we will continue to build networks of organizational partners that can act in concert to prepare millions of people of all ages and socioeconomic levels for inevitable earthquake disasters.

University Of Southern California

15.808 - U.S. Geological Survey Research and Data Collection

USGS Office of Acquisitions and Grants [DOI - USGS]

California United States

State-Wide

G-G-RDC-22-001

Amendment Since initial award the total obligations have increased 100% from $1,600,000 to $3,200,000.