Wellington, Oct 8 (IANS): International researchers have made important updates to an open-source software tool designed to evaluate earthquake forecasts.

These improvements provide governments and researchers with greater confidence in the validity of their earthquake forecasts, which is crucial for long-term planning and preparedness to increase resilience against the devastating effects of earthquakes, according to a study published on Tuesday, Xinhua news agency reported.

An international team of 12 researchers, led by New Zealand's GNS Science, have recently made enhancements to PyCSEP, a quintessential open-source software package used to develop and evaluate earthquake forecasting experiments.

"Using New Zealand as a primary case study, we tested the upgraded PyCSEP codebase to project long-term seismicity estimates from a global model onto a specific geographical region," said GNS Science Statistical Seismologist Kenny Graham.

This new feature provides valuable insight into the predictive skills and comparative performance of global models on a regional scale, said Graham, lead author of the paper published in Seismological Research Letters.