EARTHQUAKE CLOUDS AND
SHORT TERM PREDICTION
Nine Years Memory
- June 20, 1999 -
| 1. My First Prediction |
| Nine years ago, on the morning about 11:45 of June 20, 1990, I saw a big line-shaped cloud standing at the west direction with a slope of about 75o toward north from my hometown Hangzhou (30.3N, 120E), China. Its shape was different from any weather clouds. I realized that it was called an earthquake cloud by a Japanese during the Tangshan earthquake. I immediately pointed at the cloud, and told two my colleagues Chen and Fu that soon there would be a big earthquake at a far distance from Hangzhou in the northwest direction. Eighteen hours later, a 7.7 earthquake shocked not only Iran, but also my colleagues and me. The following is a comparison: |
| Date | Location | Size (ML) | |
| The prediction | 6/20 soon | Northwest of and far from Hangzhou | big |
| The earthquake | 6/20 21:00 | Iran (36.957N, 49.409E) | 7.7 |
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I recorded the prediction on paper, and my colleagues were my witnesses. It was my first prediction. Because that earthquake was the only one stronger than 7 in the northwest direction of my hometown for 333 days between May 31, 1990 and April 28, 1991, I believed that there must be a strong relationship between the cloud and the earthquake. Since this earthquake killed or injured 370,000 people, and I was the only one in the world predicted it, I felt it was my responsibility to study this subject further. On the other hand, then I was a chemist working for the Chinese government, predicting earthquake was not my job. Furthermore, in my spare time I was doing a personal research on how to clean polluted water. My method of cleaning was much faster and cheaper than the current biological method, and fish could live in the cleaned water immediately. Some environmental exports recommended me to factories to do further experiment. I had no spare time to study earthquake prediction. Due to my curiosity, I looked up the name of the Japanese who predicted the Tangshan earthquake. I found two books titled "Earthquake Clouds", one by C. Kagida, the former mayor of Nara City, Japan, and the other by Li, D.J., a young seismologist of the Chinese Science Academic. Kagida visited China and his book was published by the Chinese Science Academic in 1979. The main content of his book was the dialogue between Chinese seismologists and him. There are two points worth mentioning in his book. One is his prediction about the 7.8 Kantow earthquake on March 7, 1978 by the cloud, and the other is a photograph containing a real earthquake cloud. There are also two wrong ideas, one is that his hypothesis about the epicenter of an earthquake locating in the mid-perpendicular plane of the clouds, and the other one is that some clouds in his photographs were not earthquake clouds. Li claimed that he could predict earthquakes within a day or even an hour by the clouds or the rock- electric wave that was too good to be true. Although his book is called Earthquake Clouds, but there is not any pictures of clouds in his book. He proposed many possible causes to explain how earthquake clouds formed, and his method to me was like a policeman catching many suspects, then releasing them due to no reliable evidence. But one thing in the book, the history of earthquake clouds, was valuable. Since Kagida, the only Japanese predictor, did not predict the 7.8 Tangshan earthquake, I wondered where I got the wrong impression of a previous Japanese predicting that earthuake. After a month, I realized that it must have been a magic dream, and I had thought it as true.
I started to predict earthquakes, and did 18 prediction. Some of the 18
clouds were discovered by my wife or younger daughter at first. Then I read
some basic geology books and prepared to spend more time on earthquake
prediction research. I designed an electric device, got it patented, and sold
it for money to support my research after I retired in 1992.
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| 2. Plan Change |
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In the middle of 1993, I came to America for my older daughter Wenying's graduation at Pomona College, where she got a full scholarship for three years, and graduated Summa Cum Laude, which I am very thankful to Pomona College and its sponsors. My plan was to stay here for a few months, then bring new technology back to China to make patents or new products. That time, because I could not speak any English, I entered a language school. During that year, two important events happened to me. One was the Parkfield Prediction of the U. S. Geological Survey on November 15, 1993. Many people asked me for my opinion, and I answered that it would be a false alarm. The other one was the Northridge earthquake on January 17,1994. No American scientists foreknew it, and it was supposed to be an unpredictable example. However, I saw the Northridge earthquake cloud, and asked Wenying to translate and send my prediction to the USGS. It was January 15, Saturday, but unfortunately there was nobody in the office on weekend. I was so surprised because there is always someone in the seismic office in my hometown even though there was no earthquake in its history. I developed a deep love for the American people, especially Pomona College and its sponsors, I felt I should do something for them, and decided to stay here longer to do earthquake prediction. But my wife tried to call me back because I had a contract with a factory who used my patented device, and I needed to work with them to get the money. She was also waiting for me to return to design new products with some friends.
Fortunately, Wenying persuaded her mother not to suppose me as an inventor,
but just a simple person. My wife finally agreed to my new plan.
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| 3. Probability Calculation |
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Wenying, a Ph. D. student at Caltech, helped me write a letter to the American Government to request research support in the early 1994, and the USGS rejected my request. Five reviewers from the USGS Southern California Panel responed. Here are a few examples of the responses. One wrote, "In all my visits to China, and long association with Chinese scientists discussing earthquake prediction methods, no one has even mentioned earthquake clouds as a possible method." According to his view, if a method 'no one has even mentioned', it must be impossible. Thus, words "invent", "create", "discover", "patent", and so on should be wiped off from all dictionaries, and Galileo would have failed at the Leaning Tower of Pisa because all authorities within 19 centuries following Aristotle had a different opinion. Another wrote, "A few years back I had an opportunity to familiarize myself with the claims by some Chinese that they can predict earthquakes from earthquake clouds. After a thorough review of the subject I concluded that there is no connection between clouds and earthquakes. There is no physical model that could explain the claims..." If his fail were evidence to prove his conclusion, the fails of all craft creators would be much stronger evidence to prove that making an airplane would be impossible. In fact, his fail only means that he fell into a lie trap of those Chinese who could not predict earthquakes at all. I would not like to spent time to discuss all of those comments, but to convey one of them, "Most of the events he claims to have predicted are magnitude 5 earthquakes - according to the National Earthquake Information Center, over 800 magnitude 5 events occur every year. With a magnitude 5 everyday, his predictions have a high probability of coinciding with an earthquake somewhere." His "somewhere" is a trick to high boost the probabilities of my predictions because it breaks the area limits of my predictions. For example, my first prediction to the public on this web site or No. 36 prediction to the USGS on May 5, 1999 has an area window 27~33N and 114.5~115.5W, so within 4,900 days from January 1, 1986 to June 1, 1999, only 5 earthquakes fell into both the area window (27~33 N, and 114.5~115.5 W) and size window (>= 4.8ML) and the probability of the prediction is 2.46%. But if taking its area limit away, one will find that there were 462 earthquakes of sizes > 4.7 in the world within 163 days from January 1 to June 12, 1999. Obviously, his word "somewhere" has magic to translate a meaningful prediction to meaningless. Now let's return the trick back, the reviewer should celebrate a success of their Parkfield Prediction because there was a big one (6.1 mb) in his "somewhere" ( 51.8N, 158.7E) within their predicted time (November 17, 1993), but he did not.
Even though those comments were discouraging, I got a good idea from them, and
created a way to calculate probablility for earthquake prediction. This was an
important step of my research.
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| 4. Hard Way |
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In the early 1996, Wenying bough me an Macintosh computer and obtained data from the USGS to calculate the probablilitis of my predictions. I not only found data to support my predictions, but also many meaningful things about other precursors. For example, the 6.2 Eureka Valley (37.17N, 117.77W), Southern California earthquake on May 17, 1993 had had no foreshock within 10 km, an aftershock radius, for about three years since May 27, 1990, which shows a problem of the foreshock precursor. Another example is that once I talked with a seismologist, and he proposed Northridge as a counter-example, and doubted that there was ever any quakes prior to the January 17, 1994 earthquake. I showed him a chart containing 78 small earthquakes having occurred within 10 km from the epicenter between 1981 and the end of 1993. After that I love data very much. On November 30, 1996 Wenying taught me how to get satellite cloud images. I was eager to know how the 7.7 Iran cloud on June 20, 1990 and the 6.7 Northridge cloud moved, but was disappointed because those satellite scientists did not save the images, which is a pity. Six days later, I made my first prediction using a satellite cloud image about the 7.0 Mexico earthquake on January 11, 1997. The prediction had a 6-day delay out of a 30-day time window. According to the National Earthquake Information Center, the earthquake was "the largest earthquake in this general area since a magnitude 7.0 event on April 30, 1986." Comparing with the 10-year period, my 6-day error is negligible. During the Nature Debates between Feburary 25 and Aprial 8, 1999, Moderator Main proposed an aim: "A timescale of months to weeks" for short-term prediction in his introduction, but withdrew it at the end. The fact shows that a 49-day time window is an important discovery. In fact, the probability of this prediction covering the 6-day delay is only 5.7%.
After this mistake, I investigated more than 100 reliable examples for a
delay distribution between the clouds and their corresponding earthquakes,
and got the distribution from 18 hours to 49 days. I believe that this time
distribution has a 99% confidence. Since then, by using that new delay
distribution, no time window mistake has occurred.
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| 5. Model Maturity |
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On January 1, 1998 I found a perfect earthquake cloud Image 9801010732.jpg that a meteorologist from UCLA, whose field was special clouds, admitted that is not a weather cloud. With this cloud, I correctly predicted the 6.1 Afghanistan earthquake to both the USGS and the LA Times, with a probability 13%. This image and earthquake concisely, and powerfully prove that earthquake clouds exist. To understand the mechanism of earthquake clouds, I read many articles about friction, rock, water, vapor, pressure, temperature, earthquake phenomena, and prediction, and obtained many excellent references to support my model. A few examples are showed as the following:
"250~ 350o C" was tested from an extracted mixture of steam and water before three big earthquakes in Mexico (5), and "Before medium and strong earthquakes, due to local force effect, a lot of gas emitted, which has already been evidenced by many monitored results." (6) These two examples reflect vapor formed and escaped from the ground before big earthquakes.
There are many references that I could not cite here, but I would like to
tell an interesting analogy here. I tried image the rock broken curve,
yield strength vs. temperature, as the color change curve of phenolphthalein
indicator from pink to clear to detect a rapid pH fall from 8 to 6 while
putting HCl solution drops into NaOH solution. Finally I got it
(7). The difference between earthquake clouds
and other precursors is that the former appears at the sharp slope part of
the curve while during dehydration of the rock, while the latter occurs at
the flat part of the curve before the dehydration and that is why so many
scientists have not much luck in earthquake prediction.
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| Two Questions |
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Whether or not an earthquake can be predicted has been debated for more than a century. Recently, the problem was sharply debated by both authoritative pessimists and optimists in Nature Debates Home from February 25 to April 8, 1999, but no result was made. Moderator Main proposed an aim: "A timescale of months to weeks" for short-term prediction in his introduction1, but withdrew it at the end2. Dr. Wyss, an optimist, admitted, "I am pessimistic about the near future and optimistic about the long term."3 For the prediction, Japan spends $185 million a year29, and China spent $45 million in 199630, and the USA spent $8 million in 199531, but no reliable short-term prediction has been exhibited32-33. However, all of my tools are just a compass, a camera, and a computer. In 1999, I made six predictions, five of which are successful already, and the last two predictions, one with a time window 31 days for the 4.9 Calexico, Southern California earthquake on June 1, and the other with a time window 22 days for the 6.7 Central Mexico Earthquake on June 15, were put on this web site, built on May 5, 1999, to the public. Looking ahead, we know that all of our success only means that earthquakes can be predicted. The success is somewhat like the first airplane of the Wright Brothers, flighting 120 feet on December 17, 1903, i.e. to be useful in practice, we have a long way to go. We think that both our time window and size window are almost okay for an evacuation, but not the area window that needs to reduce to about 2,500 km2. The main impediment effecting our work is surface wind that causes three cases: (1) impossible to predict the location of an earthquake even though we know its time and size; (2) no way to reduce an area window; (3) making a location mistake. There are two ways to solve the problem. One of them is using both a net of observatories with an automatic video camera system to monitor the clouds and with a wind meter to measure surface current. The other is to monitor the gaps where the vapors of the clouds go out from a satellite. Both methods need public or government support to realize. That is why we set up this site to appeal for help. But the society is somewhat like an iceberg. We asked some TV stations to report our success, but they keep silent. A man in Channel 4 even said that he was not interested in earthquake prediction. All TV stations are interested in reporting earthquakes after they occur even a small one, for example a 2.8 ML in Los Angeles on June 18. We also wrote to some seismologists for comment, and some keep silent, too. To persuade them, we ask them two "Yes or No" questions:
If nobody can say yes to any of these questions, I hope at least they would like to
support or cooperate with us to complete this honorable historic task.
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| Building a website |
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To be continued....
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| References |
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