Visual Exploration and Analysis of Time Series Earthquake Data

Earthquake hazard estimation requires systematic investigation of past records as well as fundamental processes that cause the quake. However, detailed long-term records of earthquakes at all scales (magnitude, space and time) are not available. Hence a synthetic method based on first principals could be employed to generate such records to bridge this critical gap of missing data. RSQSim is such a simulator that generates seismic event catalogs for several thousand years at various scales. This synthetic catalog contains rich detail about the earthquake events and associated properties. Exploring this data is of vital importance to validate the simulator as well as to identify features of interest such as quake time histories, conduct analyses such as calculating mean recurrence interval of events on each fault section. This work1 describes and demonstrates a prototype web based visual tool that enables domain scientists and students explore this rich dataset, as well as discusses refinement and streamlining of data management and analysis that is less error prone and scalable.