SCEC is the Southern California Earthquake Center,
a multi-institutional research collaboration whose core funding is provided by
grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Geologic Survey.
SCEC's administrative offices are located at the University of Southern California
in Los Angeles.

The Community Stress Model is an initiative started in funding phase "SCEC4"
(2012-2016), to create building-blocks for a community model (or multiple models) 
of the stress state in the lithosphere of southern California, which is the natural
laboratory for SCEC.

"Stress" models attempt to portray the long-term-average stress directions and/or
magnitudes that would be observed if one were able to measure and average over a very
long time (e.g., 100,000 years) in which each active fault has several large earthquakes.
The SI unit of stress intensity is the Pascal (Pa), or its derived unit megaPascal (MPa).

"Stressing Rate" models attempt to describe the interseismic, "seccular" steady accumulation
of stress between earthquakes, which is driven by relative plate motion and focussed by
aseismic deep creep (assumed to be at steady rates) below the seismogenic portions of
active faults.  The units of stressing rate are Pa/s or MPa/s or MPa/year, etc.

The SCEC CSM is represented by a set of WWW pages, with base URL of:
https://www.scec.org/research/csm
Here you may see the various models displayed, compared, evaluated with respect to
data, and documented with metadata.

The files, folders, and subfolders in THIS web site ONLY describe those SCEC CSM models
that were created by Peter Bird.  For other models, please see the URL cited above.

Best wishes,
Peter Bird
Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences
University of California
pbird@epss.ucla.edu
2015.09.23