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Draft 2012 Science Plan
SCEC Planning Committee
September 2011
I. Preamble
Draft 2012 Science Plan
The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) coordinates basic research in earthquake science using Southern California
as its natural laboratory. SCEC emphasizes the connections between information gathering by sensor networks, fieldwork,
and laboratory experiments; knowledge formulation through physics-based, system-level modeling; improved understanding
of seismic hazard; and actions to reduce earthquake risk and promote resilience. The Center is a consortium of institutions that
coordinates earthquake system science within Southern California. SCEC’s long-term goal is to understand how seismic
hazards change across all time scales of scientific and societal interest, from millennia to seconds. SCEC4 will move
earthquake science forward through highly integrated collaborations that are coordinated across scientific disciplines and
research institutions and enabled by high-performance computing and advanced information technology. It will focus on six
fundamental problems of earthquake physics:
1. Stress transfer from plate motion to crustal faults: long-term fault slip rates.
2. Stress-mediated fault interactions and earthquake clustering: evaluation of mechanisms.
3. Evolution of fault resistance during seismic slip: scale-appropriate laws for rupture modeling.
4. Structure and evolution of fault zones and systems: relation to earthquake physics.
5. Causes and effects of transient deformations: slow slip events and tectonic tremor.
6. Seismic wave generation and scattering: prediction of strong ground motions.
The six fundamental problems constitute the basic-research focus of SCEC. They are interrelated and require an
interdisciplinary, multi-institutional approach. Interdisciplinary research initiatives will focus on special fault study areas, the
development of a community geodetic model for Southern California, and a community stress model. The latter will be a new
platform where the various constraints on earthquake-producing stresses can begin to be integrated. Improvements will be
made to SCEC’s unified structural representation and its statewide extensions.
Collaboration Plan. On February 1, 2012, the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) transitions from SCEC3 to
SCEC4 under joint funding from NSF/EAR and the U.S. Geological Survey. SCEC4 is funded for the period February 2012
through January 2017. This document, referred to as the collaboration plan, solicits proposals from individuals and groups to
participate in the first year of the SCEC4 research program.
II. Guidelines for Proposal Submission
A. Due Date. Friday, November 4, 2011, 5:00 pm PST. Late proposals will not be accepted. Note the different deadline
for submitting annual progress reports below.
B. Delivery Instructions. Proposals must be submitted as PDF documents via the SCEC Proposal web site at
http://www.scec.org/proposals. Submission procedures, including requirements for how to name your PDF files, will be
found at this web site.
C. Formatting Instructions.
Cover Page. The cover page should be headed with the words "2012 SCEC Proposal" and include the project title,
Principal Investigator(s), institutional affiliation, amount of request, and proposal categories (from types listed in
Section IV). List (in order of priority) three science objectives (Section VII) that your proposal addresses, for example
1a, 3c and 4b. Indicate if the proposal should also be identified with one or more of the SCEC special projects (see
Section X). Collaborative proposals involving multiple investigators and/or institutions should list all Principal
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