Common Question Reply

Relating To The 7.6 Taiwan and The 5.9 Greece Earthquakes

First of all, we thank more and more people from all over the world, including American government officers, for visiting our web page. Many readers wrote us e-mail to praise our work, ask questions, and request us to predict earthquakes where they are living. We have replied to almost all of these e-mail messages. Today, we will respond some common questions. (1) Why we can not predict all big earthquakes in the world In our essay < Give Us A Good Weapon To Hit Earthquakes > on August 27, we already answered this question. Maybe we did not give concrete examples, so people repeated the same question. Today, we would like to list the six most important difficulties in making predictions based on satellite images: 1) Satellite pages sometimes offer no data Some people asked us whether we predicted the 7.6 Taiwan earthquake on September 20, 1999 or observed its cloud. We respond that we neither predicted it, nor observed its cloud. Does it imply that this quake had no cloud? No, because neither of the two UK hemispheric sites we rely on, one unmapped and the other mapped, were functioning for a few days (the unmapped gave no data from 9/11 20:32 ~ 9/15 23:32; neither did the mapped from 9/13 13:00~ 9/15 11:00), but in general, earthquake clouds only last a few hours. 2) Images are not obtained frequently enough The 5.1 Sichuan, China earthquake cloud on July 26 was only present in one image during a 6-hour period, making it difficult to track the geographic origin of the cloud. Moreover, the 6.7 Northridge earthquake cloud only lasted for 20 minutes. It is essential that images be obtained every 30 minutes. 3) Satellite images are not sensitive enough Many earthquake clouds can be seen from the ground, but not from satellite images. For example, we photographed a series of earthquake clouds on April 12, 1999 for the 5.1 Vucca Valley, Southern California earthquake on August 17, and made a correct prediction No. 35, but we could not find them on satellite images of America. Likewise, we did not find any earthquake clouds for the August 22, 1999 Chile earthquake (6.3) on a hemispheric satellite image. But we did observe a strange geothermal ocean current. On the assumption that an ocean earthquake sometimes does not have the cloud, we made prediction No. 40, relying on a similar geothermal ocean current in California. If the prediction is right, we believe that ocean earthquakes can happen without clouds sometimes. Otherwise, it implies that the hemisphere images are not always sensitive enough for earthquake clouds. 4) Satellite sites offer conflicting data Two images from two different sites for California at the same time offered conflicting data: one site showed a line-shaped cloud, and the other nothing (99091603.gif-- we will show this in a later web page). 5) There is a lack of suitable surface wind current distribution Someone asked us if we predicted the 5.9 Greece earthquake on September 7, 1999 or found its cloud. Our reply is that we got the cloud on August 14, but could not predict the site of its origin because of a lack of surface wind current distribution. (6) There are no archives of satellite images to review Recently, we attempted to obtain the 7.7 Iran earthquake cloud on June 20, 1990, the 6.7 Northridge earthquake cloud on January 8, 1994, the 7.2 Kobe earthquake cloud on January 15~16, 1995, and so on from the American Satellite Image Archives, but no such archives existed. Almost all of the images were deleted. (2) What we are going to do  Zhonghao Shou thinks that the most important thing is to continue writing his book so more people will be able to use his methods and predict earthquakes themselves. The book called Earthquake Clouds and Short Term Prediction will explain not only his theory and practice, but also other precursors and questions, such as why the Parkfield prediction failed, whether the moon affects earthquakes, whether places with no earthquakes will still be earthquake-free, and so on. Many people have requested Shou to show his method. Recently, he has finished an article on just this subject. After its publication, he would like to reprint it on this web page A lot of people have requested Shou to show his earthquake cloud photographs and explain the whole process from data to the predictions in detail, so they will be able to predict earthquakes themselves. That is great. Shou would like to do it. All in all, we long for a day when people will not have to worry about big earthquakes anymore.

Appendix:

Image 99091603.gif for the Conflicting Data (will show tater)

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