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Room: Exhibit Hall

Date: 4/15/2025

Session Time: 8:00 AM to 5:45 PM (local time)

Adventures in Social Seismology: Earthquake Early Warnings, Operational Forecasts and Beyond 

In virtually every endeavor in which seismology is involved, there are considerations that warrant the participation of other disciplines. Social science and social scientists comprise one of these disciplinary areas and practitioners. As applied to real world issues, including earthquake hazard warnings, general and public education regarding earthquake hazards, establishing institutional trust and credibility, and other areas involving communication with various publics, social scientists are increasingly called upon to provide insights based on empirical studies and theoretical orientations. The social and behavioral sciences can provide valuable information on the social and culture environments in which scientific developments are shared with community residents and various institutional sectors.

A recent example is the effort to understand how, as earthquake early warning systems expand globally, this relatively new technology is being used: whether the recommended drop, cover and hold on self-protection strategy is being implemented by those who receive alerts; user assessments of the value of EEW; perceptions regarding threshold levels for alerting; alert message content and post-alert information; and whether users understand how EEW systems work. In short, social scientists are playing a productive role between scientific discovery and technological advances, and implementation for public benefit. Social scientists may also have a role in operational earthquake forecasting in the identification of actions that can be taken in situations involving a low probability forecast with very serious potential consequences as well as high probability forecasts for aftershocks.

The example above, involving earthquake hazard warnings, is just one example of how the social sciences intersects with seismology and we invite social scientists and seismologists with an interest in the social and economic applications of earth science developments to join this session.

Conveners 

Lindsay Davis, U.S. Geological Survey (ldavis@usgs.gov)
Roby Douilly, University of California (robyd@ucr.edu)
James D Goltz, Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto University, (jamesgoltz@gmail.com)
Susan E. Hough, U.S. Geological Survey (hough@usgs.gov)
Maggie Ortiz-Millan, Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (maggie@eeri.org)

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