A priority for action identified within the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction is to understand disaster risk. Earth Observation can play an important role in achieving this in terms of characterising the sources of seismic hazard as well as the exposure of persons and assets, and the physical environment of the potential disaster. Therefore, EO can contribute to both understanding the hazard element of disaster and some of the contributors to the risk calculation, namely where populations and buildings are located relative to the sources of such hazards. Furthermore, EO can drive the enhancement of disaster preparedness for earthquakes so that a more effective response and recovery can occur by highlighting the regions exposed to earthquake hazards, thus addressing a further priority of the Sendai Framework to increase resilience. Earth Observation currently feeds into all aspects of the disaster risk reduction cycle and, with upcoming advances, has the potential to contribute even further, particularly for identifying hazard in continental straining areas (Fig. 5). I describe each stage of the cycle in turn, highlighting some examples of the exploitation and utility of such EO datasets.
During the Earthquake
A large earthquake can take many tens of seconds to minutes to rupture from the epicentre initiation point on the fault (hypocentre) to its eventual end, which may be many hundreds of kilometres away from the start. The propagation speed of surface seismic waves is of the order a few kilometres per second, so relaying early warnings over speed-of-light networks can precede the arrival of the onset of the greatest shaking at far-field distances enabling mitigation to take place (Allen and Melgar 2019). Seismometers play a crucial role in providing this early shaking information. However, an increasing number of high-rate (20 Hz) Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) networks exist that can measure the strong ground motion and not saturate in amplitude from the passing seismic waves, and could prove important in real-time monitoring of a developing earthquake (Fig. 5). It has been recently recognised that there is the potential that once a large earthquake initiates, it is possible to determine what the eventual size of an earthquake will become. This can be done using only the first 20 s of shaking since nucleation, rather than having to wait for the whole rupture to finish propagating to the eventual end of the fault (Melgar and Hayes 2019). If this recognition that earthquake sizes have a weak determinism holds true, it offers the chance to greatly improve early warning systems as the final magnitude (of big ruptures) can be determined before the earthquake finishes. This means it may be possible to answer the long-standing question of when a small earthquake goes on to grow into a big one. For example, the South Alpine Fault on the southern Island of New Zealand is one of the largest and fastest strain accumulating strike-slip faults in the world (about 30 mm/yr). This fault is anticipated to experience large ruptures, and the regular repeat of previous major earthquakes found in the past palaeoseismological record to be an average of 330 years (Berryman et al. 2012) means we can reasonably expect a major earthquake in the coming decades. This assessment can be done with a higher degree of certainty (Biasi et al. 2015) than exists for most faults around the world where the individual fault characteristics are often poorly known. If the rupture were to initiate at the south-western end of the Alpine fault (just along strike from earlier large earthquakes that have increased the stress in this area at the Puysegur Trench in 2003, 2006 and 2009, Hamling & Hreinsdóttir 2016), then the rupture is likely to propagate in a north-eastwards direction, towards the capital Wellington over 600 km away. If it takes 20 s to establish that this earthquake will ultimately be a magnitude 8, then there will be about 80 s to provide a warning for the arrival of the first seismic waves at Wellington, and over twice this time before the strongest surface waves reach the capital. However, this relies on the installation and real-time monitoring of a number of high-rate GNSS along or near the Alpine fault, instruments which are currently relatively sparse.
In contrast, the latency of satellite-based Earth Observations means that a seismic event of minutes is long over before imagery from space is acquired. Polar orbiting satellites have relatively long repeat intervals, typically of many days (the repeat interval for a single satellite Sentinel-2 is 10 days and for Sentinel-1 is 12 days, halved when considering the pair constellation). Whilst the polar satellite orbits have a period of about 90 min, there is a trade-off between imaging area and resolution (as well as a limited line-of-sight footprint area from 700 km orbital altitude). This represents an improvement relative to past repeat intervals in the 1990–2000s of around a month (e.g., Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) was a minimum of 35 days between potential acquisitions for interferometry and typically much longer because an image was not programmed to be acquired on each pass). This reduction in latency has been achieved largely through two approaches: (1) the implementation of wider swath widths of many hundreds of kilometres (whilst often sacrificing potential technological improvements in ground spatial resolution) and (2) by having pairs of satellites, as is the case with Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 that have (near) identical twins A and B (and combined repeat times of 6 and 5 days, respectively). Further improvements have and are being made with slightly larger constellations (e.g., COnstellation of small Satellites for the Mediterranean basin Observation (COSMO-Skymed) and the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM)). Under the ESA Copernicus programme, there are further copies of the Sentinels to be launched as replacements in the future as A and/or B fails or depletes its hydrazine propellant. However, pre-emptive launching of these would have the advantage of increasing constellation sizes and thus reducing latency further. Shorter observation intervals also come from repeated coverage by overlapping tracks at high latitudes and furthermore by acquisitions often occurring in both the ascending and descending directions for SAR, a feature permissible from the day and night capability of radar.
The re-visit latency is also greatly reduced from agile imaging platforms (such as Pleiades and Worldview for high resolution optical) that do not always look at a fixed ground track (as in the case of Sentinel-2 or Landsat-8 that image at nadir) but instead have steerable sensor systems or agile platforms permitting coverage over off-track areas at higher incidence angles. The waiting time is also being reduced by large constellations of cubesats such as Planet’s hundred-plus individual platforms (“doves”), a constellation capable of imaging each point on the Earth at least every day (subject to cloud cover). In the future, continuously staring video satellites and SAR satellite systems from geo-stationary orbits may offer the chance to monitor an event in real time (Fig. 5).
Earthquake Response
The utility of EO systems for aiding the immediate response to earthquakes can be relatively late into this part of the DRM cycle due to the latency of systems mentioned above, limitations with cloud/night-time for optical systems and subsequent analysis time although this is continually improving. Whilst global seismological networks are able to estimate earthquake magnitudes and locations well and quickly (within minutes to hours), there is still room for EO to enhance the initial estimates of the sources of the earthquake hazards on the time scale of a couple of days. Actions by agencies such as the International Charter for space and major disasters over the past two decades have consistently improved the speed with which EO data and information products are made available to assess the earthquake impact on infrastructure. Measurements of ground deformation with either optical offsets or InSAR (Fig. 5) are particularly useful for: (1) identifying more precisely the geographic location of the earthquake, which is especially important for closest approach to cities and extent of aftershocks (e.g., 2010 Haiti earthquake, Calais et al. (2010)); (2) investigating the rupture of a large number of complex fault segments (e.g., 2008 Sichuan earthquake, de Michele et al. (2009), or the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake, Hamling and Hreinsdottir (2016)) not easy to ascertain with global seismology; (3) determining whether surface rupturing has occurred and constraining the depth of fault slip (important for estimates the degree of ground shaking, e.g., 2015 Gorkha earthquake, Avouac et al. (2015)); and (4) resolving the seismological focal plane ambiguity for earthquakes (which can be important in particular for strike slip earthquakes where the ambiguity is orthogonal in the surface strike direction) and the rupture direction which could be uni-lateral or bi-lateral and makes a larger difference for long ruptures (e.g., the 2018 earthquake in Palu, Sulawesi, Socquet et al. (2019)). Barnhart et al. (2019a) provide a review of the implementation of imaging geodesy for the earthquake response for a number of recent events where improvements in the initial estimates of fatalities and economic losses were made. They provide a workflow and framework for the integration of such EO data into their operational earthquake response efforts at the National Earthquake Information Centre (NEIC).
Whilst very high-resolution optical imagery may be of use in identifying the location of collapsed buildings (and therefore potentially trapped persons), buildings that “pancake” are not as obviously critically damaged when viewed in satellite imagery taken at nadir. Highly oblique images may be of greater utility (although may suffer from building shadowing in dense urban environments). A more recent advance using the behaviour of the coherence in SAR images (Yun et al. 2015) is a useful indicator of building collapse as it provides a good measure of ground disturbance. DEM differencing of urban environments generated before and after an earthquake from high-resolution stereo optical imagery (Zhou et al. 2015) also offers the future potential to quickly determine building height reductions, indicative of collapse.
In addition to the primary earthquake hazard of shaking, there are secondary hazards of landsliding and liquefaction (Fig. 5) that are triggered during the event (Tilloy et al. 2019). Optical imagery is used to map landslide scars (Kargel et al. 2016) and also displacements (Socquet et al. 2019), whilst SAR imagery offers the advantage of not requiring cloud free/daytime conditions (Burrows et al. 2019). Increased use of videos (such as from SkySat and Vivid-i) and night-time imagery (such as Earth Remote Observation System EROS-B or Jilin-1) for disaster response and rapid scientific analysis of an earthquake can be expected in this coming decade. In 2016, the German Aerospace agency (DLR) launched their Bi-Spectral Infrared Optical System (BIROS) to detect high-temperature events, often forest fires as part of a Firebird constellation comprising an earlier instrument (Halle et al. 2018). This is an enhancement of ~ 200 m ground sampling over previous lower resolution systems such as from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) at 1 km, offering the potential for identifying smaller fires that could be useful in post-earthquake triggered fires within cities. Other missions carrying a thermal infrared imaging payload at sub-100 m resolution are currently under development, e.g., Trishna (CNES-ISRO) and Land Surface Temperature Monitoring (LSTM, Copernicus-ESA) that will add to this capability.
Tsunamis triggered by large earthquakes beneath the oceans (subduction zone faulting) are a major contributor to fatalities in such events, and tsunami warnings can provide some level of response. Ocean pressure sensors can provide the observations of a tsunami wave passing across an ocean, where EO data have had a limited input into such processes to date. However, satellite altimeters such as that on Jason-1 that measure the sea surface topography can capture these waves (Gower 2005) and may provide future potential for constraining submarine earthquakes and tsunamis (Sladen and Herbert 2008) more rapidly. With polar orbiting satellites, this would rely on serendipity of the satellite footprint passing over the transitory tsunami, but with increased constellations, or geostationary orbits, or use of higher-resolution optical tracking, more operational direct tsunami wave tracking may be possible.
A major benefit of EO data in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is that its acquisition is not intrusive for the local population and government. The rapid deployment of research and data gathering personnel into an affected area is not always welcome or helpful, even if done with good intentions of trying to provide greater understanding of the event to improve outcomes in future disasters (Gaillard and Peek 2019). Using this advantage of EO, in cooperation and engagement with local partners, will maximise the effectiveness of its uptake. An increasingly important aim of organisations such as CEOS is to ensure that local capacity or international connections exist prior to disasters so that EO data are used effectively.
Recovery
In this period, further geohazards can perturb and interrupt the recovery process. Aftershocks typically decay in magnitude and frequency with time, but also seismic sequences can be protracted. Furthermore, the largest earthquake is not necessarily the first in a destructive sequence (Walters et al. 2018). Earth Observation data for large shallow aftershock events can provide further information on locations as for the main event. Operational Earthquake Forecasting can examine the time-dependent probabilities of the seismic hazard (Jordan et al. 2014) for communication to stakeholders. A time-dependent hazard model for seismicity following a major event can be estimated (Parsons 2005). One aspect of this is the transfer of stress from the earthquake fault onto surrounding fault structures which can be calculated from the distribution of slip on the fault found from inverting the surface InSAR and optical displacement data. In the recent Mw 6.4 and Mw 7.1 Ridgecrest earthquakes in California, using satellite InSAR and optical imagery, Barnhart et al. (2019b) were able to model the slip and stress evolution of an earthquake sequence (that occurred on faults not previously recognised as major active ones). They also observed the triggering of surface slip (creep) on the major Garlock strike-slip fault to the south of the earthquake zone. Understanding how faults such as these interact will be necessary to provide probabilistic calculations of time-dependent hazard. Additionally, major earthquakes often highlight the existence of hitherto unknown active faults or ones that were previously considered less important compared to known major faults (Hamling et al. 2017).
Postseismic processes such as afterslip, poroelasticity and viscous relaxation change the nature of stress in the earthquake area (Freed 2005). InSAR observations can provide useful constraints on the degree of postseismic behaviour and the magnitude of signals through time, which could prove useful in updating hazard assessments. Important insights regarding these postseismic processes, the role of fluids, lithology and fault friction can be gained from measuring surface displacements immediately after the earthquake. Following the 2014 Napa (California) earthquake, rapid deployment of on the ground measurements (DeLong et al. 2015) and GNSS (Floyd et al. 2016) enabled the capture of the very early rapid postseismic processes of slip and were further augmented by satellite radar in the weeks after the earthquake. The stresses involved in the earthquake can promote and impede postseismic slip and also cause triggered slip on other faults. Being able to track the motion on faults following a major event will enable a recalculation of the stress budget and potential for stressing other surrounding faults to incorporate this additional time varying postseismic phase (as well as highlight other previously unknown active fault traces from triggered slip). Reduced latency in Earth Observing systems is helping to contribute to this for remote areas where field teams are unlikely to get there quickly. Knowing the ratio of coseismic slip and postseismic slip better for entire fault lengths of major surface rupturing earthquakes will enable us to improve the interpretation of the magnitudes of past events (and therefore the likely amount of shaking), as this may be overestimated if a significant amount of surface offset is due to aseismic afterslip following major earthquakes, or inaccurate if the slip measured at the surface is not representative of the average slip at depth (Xu et al. 2016), or if there is significant off-fault deformation (Milliner et al. 2015). Much of this feeds into the longer-term aspects of DRM rather than immediate recovery.
Earthquakes often trigger landslides, in particular in regions of high relief with steep slopes, and identifying these is important in the response phase of an earthquake. However, the earthquake, subsequent shaking and triggered landslides also result in changes to the behaviour of the landscape in the recovery period, and landslides persist in being more frequent in the subsequent years post-earthquake (Marc et al. 2015). Measuring slopes that have experienced a change in their behaviour (rates or extents) using InSAR would be important to identify an acceleration in their sliding or initiation of new slope failures that would inform the recovery attempts for resettlement location plans, as well as for monitoring landslide dam stabilities for risk of catastrophic flooding.
When augmented with on the ground surveys, satellite imagery can contribute to the recovery process in mapping impacts to support various aspects of the reconstruction strategy. This can be the location of buildings that have been destroyed (and require subsequent debris removal), the location of populations in temporary, informal or emergency housing that may need to be rehoused and relocated (Ghafory-Ashtiany and Hosseini 2008), as well as some indicators of building condition (structure and roofs). This can be done through a range of visual, change detection and classification techniques in a manual to automated process (Contreras et al. 2016). Identification of new areas to build on around the city (green areas) would ideally take into account the change in hazard on surrounding areas from the earthquake, as faults along-strike or up-dip of rupture areas maybe become more prone to future rupture (Elliott et al. 2016b).
Mitigation
Strategies for reducing the risk from seismic hazards have long been known (Hu et al. 1996). The engineering requirements for buildings to survive ground accelerations from earthquakes are established and already codified into building regulations for many countries. However, in many areas these are not implemented due to increased costs relative to the status quo and/or an under appreciation of their necessity (such as in the case of hidden faults and their unrecognised proximity to cities), as well as due to corruption (and past legacies). This makes the identification of priority areas for seismic risk critical, especially where there are competing needs for the use of limited economic resources.
Earth Observation data support an array of geospatial mapping, which can provide a useful method of visualising complex spatial information, making such datasets and analyses more accessible to potential end users (Shkabatur and Kumagai 2014). When trying to communicate seismic hazard and risk, EO imagery can foster community engagement by placing the community's location in a geospatial context relative to the hazard, home, work and community buildings such as churches, as well as a family's relatives, emergency services and shelters. This could lead to the empowerment of communities to act on known solutions to earthquake hazard and support the enforcement of building codes to reduce the risk.
Ideally, the aim would be to move off the disaster risk management cycle so that a hazard no longer presents a risk and there would be no need for preparedness as the chance of disaster would have been negated (assuming the hazard was well enough characterised to know where it could occur and to what severity). Given that earthquakes are an ever-present hazard across many parts of the deforming world and will not decrease through time, risk can only be reduced by decreasing vulnerability or moving those exposed relative to the location of hazard. Risk prevention, in terms of moving the exposed population and assets relative to the active faulting and expected shaking, can be done at two spatial scales. At a local level, one approach is to establish setback distances from the surface traces of faults (Zhou et al. 2010) where peak ground accelerations are expected to be largest (as well as issues of differential offsets if buildings straddle the fault rupture itself). EO data can help by constraining the size of a suite of similar earthquake ruptures, their maximum surface offsets, and the width of the fault rupture zone (whether the zone is very localised or distributed over hundreds of metres, Milliner et al. 2015). Both visual inspection and subpixel image correlation of higher-resolution imagery is important for being able to detect the degree of on and off fault deformation due to an earthquake rupture (Zinke et al. 2014). The availability of open datasets of high-resolution imagery lags behind that of commercial operators (10 m open versus 0.3 m closed), but the higher resolution is important for pixel correlation as the measurable offsets are a fraction of the pixel size. Higher-resolution imagery would enable the detection of smaller movements and better characterisation of the width of active fault zones.
At a broader spatial scale, shifting the exposure relative to the hazard can be done to a much greater degree, such as occurred when the capital of Kazakhstan was relocated away from Almaty, in part because of seismic hazard considerations (Arslan 2014). This decision was taken because Almaty is exposed to a large seismic hazard and suffered a series of devastating earthquakes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Grützner et al. 2017). The capital is instead based in Nur-Sultan (formerly Astana) which is both away from past earthquakes and is not in a zone rapidly straining, and is therefore considered to be of lower hazard. Such a relocation of the exposed population requires a good knowledge of where active faults are that could rupture in the future, and the potential sizes or magnitudes of future earthquakes, including what the largest credible size would be within the timeframe of human interest. Otherwise, relocating a population away from an area that has just experienced a devastating earthquake could place them in a zone that still has a significant seismic hazard or in fact a heightened hazard (such as occurs during along-strike faulting from stress changes, Stein et al. 1997). Using GNSS and InSAR data over deforming belts will enable the identification of regions within a country that are building up strain relatively slowly. For example, in some countries such as New Zealand, whilst there are regions of relatively much higher and much lower strain rate, even the slowly deforming regions are still capable of producing damaging earthquakes (Elliott et al. 2012).
At a city scale, it is important to identify the location of the faults and their segmentation. This is necessary for determining the location of faults relative to the exposure. This also allows the estimation of hazard and losses for potential earthquake scenarios, for example, by comparing rupture of a fault right beneath a city versus that expected for distant fault ruptures (Hussain et al. 2020). Such analysis is best done in conjunction with field studies and dating of fault activity from paleoseismological trenching (e.g., Vargas et al. 2014) to help ascertain the recurrence intervals and the time since the most recent event as well as potential sizes of events. Once the most exposed elements in a city are identified, mitigation by seismic reinforcement from retrofitting buildings (Bhattacharya et al. 2014) could be applied to reduce the vulnerability of certain districts. Optical imagery that captures the expansion of cities could help identify the growth of suburbs and districts onto fault scarps that leave the population more exposed. Such urban growth also hides the potential geomorphological signals of past activity from assessment today. The use of DEMs at a city scale can also help identifying relative uplift and folds beneath a city that mark out the location of active faulting (Talebian et al. 2016).
Over wider areas, previous work using EO data such as InSAR and GNSS has sought to measure the rate at which major faults are accumulating strain (Tong et al. 2013). By measuring the surface velocities across major fault zones, it is possible to determine which faults are active and how fast they accrue a slip deficit. The fastest faults are generally considered to be more hazardous, and these faster rates are more easily measured with EO techniques. Such information can then be used alongside rates of seismicity and longer-term geologic estimates of fault slip rates to make earthquake rupture forecasts (Field et al. 2014) so that regions to target for mitigation can be identified. An important component of measuring fault strain accumulation is whether there are significant creeping segments (Harris 2017) that are slipping continuously (Jin and Funning 2017) and by how much does this lower the hazard. High resolution EO imagery over wide areas provides the possibility of picking out active faults by identifying such creeping segments. Identifying the size, depth extent and persistence through time of creeping areas on major faults (Jolivet et al. 2013) can provide constraints on whether these slowly slipping portions can act as barriers to major ruptures.
Preparedness
In order to know where to prepare for earthquakes, we need to know where active faults are located and where strain is accumulating within the crust. It is necessary, but not sufficient, to also know where past earthquakes have occurred. This is because past earthquakes represent areas where strain has accumulated sufficiently to lead to rupture. A region that has previously had earthquakes is likely to be able to host them in the future. It also gives us the time since the last earthquake to determine the slip deficit that may have accumulated in that interval. But due to long recurrence times relative to the length of past seismicity records, a region that is currently devoid of past major earthquakes may still be capable of producing one if it is accumulating strain. If earthquakes were to follow a regular pattern in which they had a constant (periodic) time interval between successive ruptures (Fig. 6), then the task of forecasting them would be trivial. Some faults have enough past observations or inferences of earthquakes that it is possible to assess the degree to which they host regular earthquakes (Berryman et al. 2012), and the degree to which they deviate from periodic. A fault with a low coefficient of variation (CoV) of time intervals between successive ruptures has a pattern of earthquakes that is said to be quasi-periodic, and from which estimates of the probability of a future rupture can be updated based upon the time since the last earthquake, i.e. it is time dependent (with uncertainty ranges based in part upon the degree of variation thus far observed). This is because the mean recurrence interval is more meaningful as the relative standard deviation becomes lower. In contrast, a time-independent process follows a Poisson distribution. The time to the next earthquake does not depend on how long ago the last earthquake occurred and the coefficient of variation is 1 (Fig. 6), with the probability of rupture constant through time. This acts as a good reference case against which to compare other patterns of faulting events. Although we may attribute this to the actual behaviour of a fault, such attributions are more likely due to the fact that we do not understand the underlying physical processes that drive, govern and control the rupture characteristics of the fault. In contrast to this behaviour, if a fault zone ruptures episodically, the seismicity is said to be clustered through time, with many events close together (relative to a mean recurrence) separated by a long hiatus with no earthquakes (Marco et al. 1996). The picture becomes much more complex when considering interacting faults, triggered seismicity and event clustering (Scholz 2010). For most faults in the world, the number of previous events and their timings are very poorly known, and the recurrence times may be very long compared to the 100 years used as an example here. Considering Fig. 6, a more realistic time horizon for the knowledge of even major faults may only be the past 1000 years of historical records from which patterns of behaviour cannot be determined given typical recurrence intervals. Interpreting palaeoseismic records of past events and trying to calculate slip rates from previous fault offsets leads to large epistemic uncertainties when the observation window is a small multiple of only a few mean recurrence intervals (Styron 2019). Further to this, if one considers the typical lifetime of an individual (and more so that of a government), the relatively long recurrence interval and variability of earthquakes may go some way to explaining the difficulties in communicating hazard and stoking an impetus for action. We usually do not know the past characteristics of a fault, nor do we know whether it is really time independent or the form of the time dependence, leading to a deep level of uncertainty (Stein and Stein 2013). One option under this situation is to take a robust risk management approach to deal with the breadth of reasonable scenario outcomes.
Therefore, in terms of preparedness, current techniques harnessing EO are more focussed on identifying the regions accumulating strain, as opposed to the response phase where EO is aimed at understanding the earthquake deformation process itself. Areas that pose particular difficulty in assessing the sources of hazard are those accumulating strain relatively slowly (Landgraf et al. 2017), where such approaches using decadal strain rates may not be appropriate (Calais et al. 2016). However, given that we do not always have enough knowledge about past earthquake behaviour and seismicity for a region, this alternative of measuring the accumulation of strain can provide a forecast of the expected seismicity (Bird and Kreemer 2015), and in the past this has been based upon GNSS measurements of strain. Using GNSS observations to derive crustal velocities from over 22 thousand locations, Kreemer et al. (2014) produced a Global Strain Rate Model (GSRM). From this, Bird and Kreemer (2015) forecast shallow seismicity globally based upon the accumulation of strain observed from these GNSS velocities. This can be combined with past seismological catalogues to enhance the capability for forecasting (Bird et al. 2015) such as in the Global Earthquake Activity Rate Model (GEAR). One current aim is to combine EO datasets of interferometric SAR time series with GNSS results to calculate an improved measure of continental velocities and strain rates (Fig. 7) at a higher resolution and with more complete global coverage of straining parts of the world that may lack dense GNSS observations. From these rates of strain, it is possible to estimate earthquake rates and forecasts of seismicity (Bird and Liu 2007) to calculate hazard. When combined with the exposure and vulnerability, this information can then be used to calculate seismic risk (Silva et al. 2014). A challenge of using surface velocities and strain derived from geodetic data is being able to differentiate long-term (secular) interseismic signals from those that are transient (Bird and Carafa 2016).
An important contribution of EO data of strain accumulation is in determining which portions of a fault are locked and building up a slip deficit, and which are stably sliding. This fraction of locking is termed the degree of coupling. By determining which portions are currently locked (i.e. the spatial variability of coupling), it may be possible to build up a range of forecasts of earthquake patterns on a fault (Kaneko et al. 2010). InSAR measurements of creeping fault segments highlight which portions of a partially coupled fault are stably sliding, and which are more fully locked, and when bursts of transient slip have occurred (Rousset et al. 2016). By determining the extent of these areas, it is possible to develop a time-dependent model of creep and establish the rate of slip deficit that builds up over time, and the potential size of earthquakes possible on a given fault section (Shirzaei and Bürgmann 2013). Determining the spatio-temporal relationship between locked regions of faults and transient slow slip portions is important to understand the potential for these stabling sliding regions to both release accumulated elastic energy and also drive subsequent failure on other portions of the fault (Jolivet and Frank 2020).
Rollins and Avouac (2019) calculate long-term time independent earthquake probabilities for the Los Angeles area based upon GNSS derived interseismic strain accumulation and the instrumental seismic catalogue. By examining the frequency–magnitude distribution of smaller earthquakes that have already occurred, they are able to estimate the maximum magnitude of earthquakes and the likelihood of certain sized events occurring in the future. Estimates of the rate of strain accumulation from EO datasets are needed to determine the rate of build-up of the moment deficit for such analysis. For fast faults that are plate bounding and relatively simple, with few surrounding faults to interact with, a time-dependent model may be appropriate. This time dependence since the last earthquake comes from the concept of the accumulation of strain within the crust. Using InSAR measurements across most of the length of the North Anatolian Fault, Hussain et al. (2018) showed that it is reasonable to use short-term geodetic measurements to assess long-term seismic hazard, as the measured velocities from EO are constant through time apart from during the earliest parts of the postseismic phase following major earthquakes. However, the use of a time-dependent model has been argued to have failed on the Parkfield area of the San Andreas Fault as it did not perform as expected in forecasting the repeating events on this fault (Murray and Segall 2002). The accumulation of strain through time leads to an interseismic moment deficit rate which is considered to be a guide to the earthquake potential of a fault. Being able to place bounds on this deficit is important for accurate assessment of the hazard (Maurer et al. 2017). By comparing the interseismic slip rates derived from EO with known past earthquakes and postseismic deformation, Michel et al. (2018) find that the series of past earthquakes on the Parkfield segment of the San Andreas Fault is not sufficient to explain the moment deficit. They conclude that larger earthquakes with a longer return period than the window of historical records are possible on this fault to explain the deficit. For the state of California, where there is information on active fault locations, past major ruptures, fault slip rates, seismicity and geodetic rates of strain, it has been possible to develop sophisticated time-independent (Field et al. 2014) and time-dependent forecast models (Field et al. 2015) termed the third Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast (UCERF3).
An even harder problem is to characterise the accumulation of strain and slip release for offshore portions of subduction zones which host the largest earthquakes and also generate tsunamis. The expanding field of sea floor geodesy techniques opens up a huge area of the Earth’s surface to future measurement of earthquake cycle processes (Bürgmann and Chadwell 2014) that can be used in seismic and tsunami hazard assessment. One of the methods for seafloor geodesy links GNSS systems with seafloor transponders to detect movement of the seafloor relative to an onshore reference station. The large costs of instrumentation and seafloor expeditions have limited the deployment of such technologies so far. Understanding such fault zone processes as slow slip at subduction zones is important as it both releases some of this strain aseismically but may also drive other areas closer to failure and is itself promoted by nearby earthquakes (Wallace et al. 2017). Such slow slip behaviour can be captured onshore with dense GNSS and InSAR.
The global earthquake model (GEM) foundation is an initiative to create a world resilient to earthquakes by enhanced preparedness, improving risk management from their collection of risk resources. Their global mosaic of seismic hazard models (Pagani et al. 2018) includes constraints using geodetic strain rates where available, such as for UCERF3 in California. This hazard mosaic will continue to be updated as hazard maps are enhanced regionally around the globe, and EO constraints on strain rates will help improve characterisations of the input hazard. In particular, GEM have compiled an Active Faults database (Fig. 3) from a compilation of regional databases (e.g., Styron et al. 2010) which is continually being added to, and can be guided by constraints from EO data using optical imagery, DEMs and geodetic measurements of faults. By combining the Global Hazard map with exposure and vulnerability models (Fig. 7), a Global Seismic Risk map (Silva et al. 2018) is produced of the geographic distribution of average annual losses of buildings and human lives due to damage from ground shaking. By sharing these in an open and transparent manner, GEM’s aim is to advocate for reliable earthquake risk information to support disaster risk reduction planning.
Right at the end of the disaster management cycle is the Holy Grail of preparedness that are earthquake precursors (Cicerone et al. 2009)—the ability to forecast an impending seismic rupture and prevent a potential disaster. This has been an ever-present endeavour of a section of the community to find signals that might foretell of an upcoming earthquake. However, despite decades of research (Wyss 1991), a reliable technique accepted by the wider community has not arisen that can provide an earthquake prediction in terms of giving a temporally and spatially constrained warning of an imminent earthquake rupture that could be safely used to evacuate, or take measures to ensure the safety of, an exposed population.
A current debate surrounding processes prior to earthquake nucleation leaves open the question of whether major events may be triggered by a cascade of foreshocks or whether propagating slow slip triggers earthquake nucleation (Gomberg 2018). Measuring foreshocks is largely the preserve of sensitive seismological equipment, and given that slow slip at depth may be small, its measurement by EO imaging systems may remain unfeasible. Detecting small changes in creep rates of faults has typically been done with surface creepmeters in the past for specific locations (Bilham et al. 2016), but InSAR observations can be used to measure wider area creep rates and determine longer-term background rates to measure deviations from this (Rousset et al. 2016). Perhaps identification of subtle accelerations of creep (or creep events) may be possible using EO observations of strain, but both the time resolution and sensitivity would need to be greatly enhanced beyond current capabilities.