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While deterministically predicting the time and location of earthquakes remains impossible, earthquake forecasting models can provide estimates of the probabilities of earthquakes occurring within some region over time. To enable informed decision‐making of civil protection, governmental agencies, or the public, Operational Earthquake Forecasting (OEF) systems aim to provide authoritative earthquake forecasts based on current earthquake activity in near‐real time. Establishing OEF systems involves several nontrivial choices. This review captures the current state of OEF worldwide and analyzes expert recommendations on the development, testing, and communication of earthquake forecasts. An introductory summary of OEF‐related research is followed by a description of OEF systems in Italy, New Zealand, and the United States. Combined, these two parts provide an informative and transparent snapshot of today's OEF landscape. In Section 4, we analyze the results of an expert elicitation that was conducted to seek guidance for the establishment of OEF systems. The elicitation identifies consensus and dissent on OEF issues among a non‐representative group of 20 international earthquake forecasting experts. While the experts agree that communication products should be developed in collaboration with the forecast user groups, they disagree on whether forecasting models and testing methods should be user‐dependent. No recommendations of strict model requirements could be elicited, but benchmark comparisons, prospective testing, reproducibility, and transparency are encouraged. Section 5 gives an outlook on the future of OEF. Besides covering recent research on earthquake forecasting model development and testing, upcoming OEF initiatives are described in the context of the expert elicitation findings. Plain Language Summary: The exact location, time, and magnitude of future earthquakes cannot be predicted. However, based on past earthquake sequences, it is possible to assess probabilities for future earthquakes. This is called earthquake forecasting. Operational Earthquake Forecasting (OEF) systems are designed to provide near‐real‐time authoritative earthquake forecasts, based on current earthquake activity, to aid the decision‐making of various societal stakeholders. Setting up these systems is complex, involving decisions about which model to use, how to best test the model, and how to turn earthquake probability estimates into practical information. This review captures the current state of OEF worldwide and analyzes expert recommendations on the development, testing, and communication of earthquake forecasts. Section 2 provides an overview of OEF‐related research and the background knowledge required to understand the other parts. Section 3 describes existing OEF systems of Italy, New Zealand, and the United States in detail. Section 4 discusses an elicitation of expert views on modeling, testing, and communicating earthquake forecasts (Mizrahi, Dallo, & Kuratle, 2023, https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz‐b‐000637239). Data from the elicitation allow to identify consensus and dissent on OEF issues and provide guidance for future earthquake forecasting efforts. Finally, Section 5 gives an outlook on future OEF‐related research and planned OEF efforts at various institutions. Key Points: We capture the state of earthquake forecasting systems in Italy, New Zealand, and the United States, and future plans in these and other countriesExperts encourage benchmark comparison, prospective testing, reproducibility and transparency, but avoid endorsing specific models or testsExperts stress the need to co‐design forecast communication products with end‐users to ensure their societal relevance and usefulness [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP) is an international effort to evaluate earthquake forecast models prospectively. In CSEP, one way to express earthquake forecasts is through a grid-based format: the expected number of earthquake occurrences within 0.1° × 0.1° spatial cells. The spatial distribution of seismicity is thereby evaluated using the Spatial test (S-test). The high-resolution grid combined with sparse and inhomogeneous earthquake distributions leads to a huge number of cells causing disparity in the number of cells, and the number of earthquakes to evaluate the forecasts, thereby affecting the statistical power of the S-test. In order to explore this issue, we conducted a global earthquake forecast experiment, in which we computed the power of the S-test to reject a spatially non-informative uniform forecast model. The S-test loses its power to reject the non-informative model when the spatial resolution is so high that every earthquake of the observed catalog tends to get a separate cell. Upon analysing the statistical power of the S-test, we found, as expected, that the statistical power of the S-test depends upon the number of earthquakes available for testing, e.g. with the conventional high-resolution grid for the global region, we would need more than 32 000 earthquakes in the observed catalog for powerful testing, which would require approximately 300 yr to record M ≥ 5.95. The other factor affecting the power is more interesting and new; it is related to the spatial grid representation of the forecast model. Aggregating forecasts on multi-resolution grids can significantly increase the statistical power of the S-test. Using the recently introduced Quadtree to generate data-based multi-resolution grids, we show that the S-test reaches its maximum power in this case already for as few as eight earthquakes in the test period. Thus, we recommend for future CSEP experiments the use of Quadtree-based multi-resolution grids, where available data determine the resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, coal mine methane measurement techniques in mines have been gaining importance as poor firedamp control in work can cause the interruption of production and even fatal accidents. Since there is currently a variety of methane measurement equipment with different functional characteristics and measurement principles, a study is needed to indicate which type of equipment has the highest degree of confidence. This research presents the results of a study carried out by the Official Laboratory J. M. Madariaga (LOM) of the Polytechnic University of Madrid that aims to analyze the reliability of methane detection systems used in underground mining. Therefore, a series of portable and non-portable methane detectors with different measurement principles have been selected to subject them to laboratory tests following the methods described in the applicable regulations, such as time of response, dust effect, temperature, pressure, etc. The test equipment is usually the one used in the certification and calibration of these devices, subject to the LOM quality system. The results of these tests allowed for defining a marking system that led to a ranking of the tested methane detectors in order to find the advantages and disadvantages of each type. From the performed tests, a summary of the main sources of sensor inaccuracy was reported. It was found that catalytic sensors might present significant deviations when testing high concentrations in short periods of time or low concentrations during long periods of time. On the other hand, devices with an interferometric sensor can be unreliable as the measures are very sensitive to changes in environmental conditions, and optical sensors present longer response times than catalytic sensors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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