Earthquake Predictions
ABOUT
Chinese chemist Zhonghao Shou has been interested in weather forecasting since he was only 7. After consistent leaning and practice, his forecasting was even better than official's sometimes. For example, he found a typhoon cloud, on a hot and humid evening (August 7, 1988), and nailed windows of his apartment in Hangzhou (30.3N, 120E). Neighbors laughed at his craze because of no official warnings. Nevertheless, a strong typhoon or hurricane, with a magnitude of 12, indeed occurred early next morning and killed about 30 people.
On June 20, 1990, Shou found a sudden, single cloud shaped like a long pole in the northwest sky of Hangzhou. He pointed out this cloud to his two colleagues and predicted an earthquake similar to Tangshan earthquake. Eighteen hours later, a M7.7 earthquake killed 50,000 people in northern Iran. It was the only earthquake, with a magnitude
greater than 7, northwestward from Hangzhou within 333 days from May 31, 1990 to April 28, 1991. This non-meteorological cloud and the high coincidence between the cloud and the earthquake suggested the cloud from underground.
Shou has discovered a novel method for making short-term earthquake predictions and this method has been recently patented in the United States. His method is based on analyzing available surface temperature and satellite image data to look for anomalous signs that is indicative of geological activities preceding a large earthquake.
From 1994 to 2001, he has submitted 50 predictions to the United States Geological Survey, with each prediction specifying the time, location, and magnitude window of an impending earthquake. 68% of the predictions were correct in all three windows. In comparison, no geologist in the US has yet to make a single correct prediction, despite millions of dollars of research grants every year. Importantly, statistical analysis showed that the probability of a random guesser to achieve equivalent prediction performance is 1 out of 16000.
Shou has applied his method to correctly predict the 2003 M6.8 Iran Bam earthquake one day before the earthquake. As a result, the United Nations invited him to attend Space technology and Disaster Prevention workshop, published his Bam Earthquake Prediction & Space Technology in its 2004 yearbook (SEMINARS of the United Nations Programme on Space Applications), and distributed this book to all member states.
Using the same theory, Shou was able to attribute the crash of French airbus in 2009 to the same strong geological activities preceding earthquakes and published his findings Using the earthquake vapor theory to explain the French airbus crash in the Remote Sensing Letters, an international journal. Numerous evidence of high temperature due to earthquake vapour leading to this crash, such as "the fact that the high temperature meant that they could not climb to flight level 370" can be found at BEA's Final Report, and further proved his theory.
On November 29, 2011, Shou was awarded a US patent (US 8,068,985B1) Method of precise earthquake prediction and prevention of mysterious air and sea accidents.
