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reviews, both the National Science Foundation and U.S. Geological Survey were going to commit substantial resources to the
next five years of the SCEC program.
In late May, we were given the panel reviews and official agency letters of commitment. Our NSF program officer Greg
Anderson stated:
“I am very pleased to inform you that your proposal ‘The Southern California Earthquake Center, Phase 4 (SCEC4):
Tracking Earthquake Cascades’ has successfully undergone review by NSF, in cooperation with our USGS partners…
I intend to recommend funding for this proposal as a cooperative agreement with a five-year duration beginning 1
February 2012, at an annual anticipated funding level of $3,000,000 (total of $15,000,000 over the award duration).”
UGSG contracting officer Margaret Eastman stated:
“Your proposal submitted to USGS for support of SCEC4 has been favorably reviewed and is recommended for five
years of funding at the requested level of $1,340,000 for the first year, pending availability of funds. USGS may not be
able to support the requested inflationary increases in years two through five as our budgets typically do not include
such inflationary increases.”
Separate panel reviews were conducted by the NSF and USGS. The review summaries, which totaled 26 pages, contain
detailed and generally favorable evaluations of SCEC3 progress and the SCEC4 proposal. The panels made a series of
thoughtful recommendations to improve SCEC interactions, especially with groups external to SCEC. For example, the NSF
panel recommended that a special advisory structure be created to help our well-regarded Communication, Education, and
Outreach (CEO) program set up and evaluate progress toward new milestones and measures-of-success. CEO Associate
Director Mark Benthien and I have asked the SCEC Advisory Council to consider what type of structure under its umbrella
would be most appropriate to implement this recommendation.
From the perspective of this meeting, the most important conclusion of the reviews was the acceptance by both panels of the
science plan articulated in the
SCEC4 proposal. The SCEC4
scientific program is framed in
terms of a very challenging, longterm
research goal: to understand
how seismic hazards change across
all time scales of interest, from
millennia to seconds. This problem
is well suited to SCEC’s
integrated approach to
earthquake system science.
Earthquakes emerge from
complex, multiscale interactions
within active fault systems that
are opaque, and are thus difficult
to observe. They cascade as
chaotic chain reactions through
the natural and built
environments, and are thus
difficult to predict. The practical
goals of SCEC4 research program
are focused on time-dependent
seismic hazard analysis—the
geoscience required to “track
earthquake cascades” (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Earthquake processes (in blue) cascade through the natural and built environments,
depicted here for a single damaging event on a nonlinear time line. Advancing the science behind
long-term hazard modeling, operational earthquake forecasting, earthquake early warning, and
delivery of post-event information (in red) will help reduce seismic risk and improve community
resilience.
The SCEC4 science plan was developed by the Center’s Board of Directors and Planning Committee with broad input from the
SCEC community. A committee chaired by Nadia Lapusta assessed the basic research that will be needed to move towards the
Center’s scientific goals, identifying six fundamental problems in earthquake physics (Table 1).
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