Volkan Sevilgen

Temblor is an NSF (National Science Foundation) funded tech company providing a personal, immediate and credible source of natural risk understanding and solutions for everyone. Temblor estimates the likelihood of seismic shaking and related home damage as well as flood and wildfire potential. Temblor allows users to evaluate cost/benefits of retrofit and insurance, and connects its users to insurance and retrofit providers. Temblor publishes articles about recent natural hazards, which are often featured by NY Times, BBC, San Francisco Chronicle, LA Times, CBS, The Washington Post, Nature and Science.

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Articles published by Nature and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Sevilgen et al. PNAS, 2012 found that one of the largest earthquake (2004 Mag. 9.2 Sumatra Indonesia) recorded has significantly changed the earthquake occurrences as far as 400 km from the fault. During the five years following the earthquake, 300 km long section of the fault has stopped producing earthquakes while similar size adjacent area ramped-up earthquake occurrence. Pollitz, Stein, Sevilgen, Burgmann, Nature, 2012 found that the 2012 Sumatra Mag. 8.6 earthquake created worldwide aftershocks during six days after the earthquake due to the stress caused by its seismic waves. The USGS released a press statement for both papers, which drew an international media coverage. Multi-National Project Management Volkan became a dual US-Turkish citizen in 2012. US Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance granted funds for USGS to carry out the Balkans Seismic Hazard Assessment. Sevilgen managed the project as he gathered a team of experts from the region. He organized workshops and performed seismic hazard calculations with the team members using GEM’s OpenQuake software. Ross Stein (Principal Investigator), and Sevilgen visited leading institutions and the US embassies in the eight Balkan countries and presented the project results. The project was featured in a Nature news article. Software Developing, Testing and International Teaching (Toda, Stein, Sevilgen, Lin) developed Coulomb 3 software for aftershock hazard assessment: 2011 Tohoku, Japan M=9, 2010 Maule, Chile M=8.8, 2014 Napa M=6 earthquakes are analyzed and published in scientific journals. Sevilgen gave an NPR (National Public Radio) interview on the 2011 Tohoku M=9 earthquake. The Coulomb 3 software is published as a USGS open file report, and Sevilgen taught Coulomb at the "Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute (PASI): Magma-Tectonic Interactions in the Americas" in Nicaragua.

Scientific software development Volkan joined the Team Coulomb (Shinji Toda, Ross Stein, Volkan Sevilgen, Jian Lin) assisting in developing Coulomb Stress Modeling software, and researching earthquake triggering. The team created the Coulomb 3 as a MATLAB based software supported by multi-platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux). Volkan performed extensive testing of the Coulomb outputs against the earlier Coulomb versions and created the Coulomb website, registration system, and plug-ins for Coulomb 3. The Coulomb team gave many training sessions both in the US and internationally. One of these training sessions (6 hours total) is recorded, and available on Sevilgen’s Youtube channel. Sevilgen provides technical and scientific support of the software, which has over 5000 registered users globally. Sevilgen calculated Coulomb stress change analyses for recent global, and US earthquakes. He published the Coulomb stress analysis for the 2008 Wells, NV M=6 earthquake, and he is a co-author in the paper by Haukkson et al. about the 2008 Chino Hills, CA M=5.5 earthquake.

Courses: http://www.sis.itu.edu.tr/eng/curriculums/plan/JEFE/201110.html