Strong motion monitoring in Italy

Abstract

Research in the fields of earthquake engineering or engineering seismology requires strong motion data for several applications, such as the development of ground motion prediction equations, the evaluation of shaking scenarios, the definition of probabilistic hazard maps and the formulation of seismic codes.Italy is one of the most hazardous countries in Europe and several moderate to strong earthquakes occurred since the early 1970s, when an early stage strong motion monitoring began. During the past 30 years strong motion data were mainly collected by the Italian strong motion network, initially managed by the Italian electricity company and then by the Italian civil protection, and by several regional strong-motion networks, installed in late 1990s. After three decades of monitoring the Italian strong motion patrimony has become relevant, and the need of an organized strong-motion archive, accessible on the world wide web has turned out to be vital.This special issue of the Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering contains nine articles with the aim of illustrating to the scientific community the progress achieved in Italy in the field of strong motion monitoring and strong motion data archiving and dissemination.It contains a detailed description of the Italian strong-motion network ) and several regional networks owned by different public institutions (Augliera et al. 2010;Iannaccone et al. 2010;Attolico et al. 2010;Costa et al. 2010). The Italian accelerometric archive (ITACA, http://itaca.mi.ingv.it) is then illustrated. Developed in the framework of the agreement between Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia

INGV strong-motion data web-portal: a focus on the Emilia seismic sequence of May-June 2012

“…The progress achieved in Italy in the field of strong-motion monitoring and strong-motion data archiving and dissemination was illustrated in a recently published special issue of the Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering [Luzi et al 2010]. The strong-motion data recorded by the RAN have been distributed and are available on request to the DPC and to the Italian Accelerometric Archive (ITACA), as the Italian strong-motion database (http://itaca.mi.ingv.it/) [Pacor et al 2011a], which has been updated with records to 2009.…”