Objective:
To prepare a basic earthquake catalogue
of Europe, with special reference to long-term seismicity, and
a database of primary data. This dataset will provide a tool for
understanding the time/space seismicity patterns and a reliable
input for seismic hazard assessment.
Brief description of project:
The seismicity in Europe is rather uneven:
the knowledge of it is also uneven, due to the fact that seismicity
is currently investigated at a national level (in some cases even
at a sub-national level) and that no systematic, European-size
investigation of the period before 1800 has been undertaken so
far. National catalogues differ in compilation philosophy, time-window,
quality of primary data, parameterisation procedures, format,
updating; some are published, some not; in general it is very
difficult to state the type and quality of the dataset from which
they are compiled.
This project will first retrieve and merge
the sets of primary information into a single dataset; this dataset
will integrate, for the first time at a European level, uniformly
assessed data of earthquakes across national frontiers. As a first
step a "working file" will be created by selecting and
merging the national/regional catalogues and performing a preliminary
screening, in order to select the most significant earthquakes
for each area. A survey will then be performed in order to retrieve
the existing dataset related to each selected event; earthquakes
for which data are poor or no dataset is available will be investigated,
in order to ensure a minimum level of information.
The next step, the evaluation of earthquake parameters and the catalogue compilation will be performed by processing the new dataset according to uniform criteria. In such a way a new catalogue will be compiled and it will be used for preliminary hazard assessment, in order to evaluate both the progress allowed by the new data and the areas/time-windows which require further investigation.