Short-term hazard estimate: weekly probability of having one or more earthquakes
magnitude 4.0 or greater.
MPS04 long-term seismic hazard model, represented with the colors that will be used for its update, identified for greater readability.
The Seismic Danger Center was set up by the President of INGV with decree no. 11 of 15 January 2013. According to the decree "from the date of this decree, the Seismic Danger Center (CPS) is established with the task to promote a centralized research coordination of INGV and to develop an infrastructure for the experimentation of innovative methods, the development of verification procedures and the production of seismic hazard assessments in the short, medium and long term.”
The coordinator of the CPS is Andrè Herrero as per
The mission of the CPS
The CPS promotes a centralized research coordination of INGV through which to acquire continuously updated data and produce seismic hazard assessments based both on consolidated methods and on the experimentation of innovative methods. The intention is to achieve synergistic convergences between different INGV research groups (and possibly other national and international research structures), in order to obtain estimates for different time scales, which can be used for specific applications in the Italian territory or in different that may derive from other projects that will finance the CPS.
Participation in international projects and initiatives in the field of seismic hazard is of fundamental importance in order to actively contribute to the development of consolidated procedures for calculating hazards in the short, medium and long term.
The activity of the CPS is articulated through the creation of a technological infrastructure and the formation of a dedicated working group. The CPS promotes, also through the DPC, collaborations and synergies with institutions operating in the field of seismic engineering, such as Eucentre and ReLUIS, to produce calculations that can be used by them in seismic risk analysis.
The objectives of the PSC
Infrastructure for calculating the hazard
The CPS has its own technological infrastructure for
- the calculation of seismic hazard by integrating the most up-to-date data and using different models;
- the management of the databases produced;
- the return of seismic hazard estimates, also through web applications.
In addition, IT tools have been developed to facilitate the preparation, execution and comparison of hazard models according to standard formats and shared calculation procedures, allowing the sensitivity of the estimates to be verified quickly. The infrastructure is organized in such a way as to favor activities in synergy, including technological ones, with some international initiatives such as, for example, the Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability, CSEP, and the Global Earthquake Model, GEM.
Development of hazard models
The CPS promotes experimentation with innovative methods and models for calculating short, medium and long-term hazards. By way of example, the CPS aims to:
- experimenting with approaches that take into consideration geological, seismological and geodetic information not yet included in earthquake occurrence models;
- experiment with innovative approaches that integrate physical modeling for a more accurate and precise estimate of ground motion;
- develop procedures for the objective choice of the weights to be attributed to the various branches of the logic tree;
- experiment alternative probabilistic methods to the logical tree approach, as well as appropriate methodologies for the full exploration of the uncertainties in hazard estimates.
Verification of the accuracy and precision of seismic hazard models
All the elaborations produced through the experimentation are subjected to verification according to reliable experimental approaches and compliant with international standards (such as CSEP or others).
Production of hazard maps
The CPS has planned the regular production of short, medium and long-term hazard maps, updated with a timing dictated by the degree of scientific knowledge acquired. Hazard estimates are essentially probabilities and therefore intimately connected with uncertainties. It is of fundamental importance to study the most efficient means to communicate to a wide range of possible users, using a website, social networks, and other communication procedures, compliant with the communication policies of INGV and DPC. The CPS guarantees that the maps produced:
- adopt international standards compliant with the state of the art (e.g. Senior Seismic Hazard Analysis Committee – SSHAC, 1997);
- derive from open and transparent procedures, with the broad involvement of the scientific community;
- are made available, according to formats agreed with the DPC, to the DPC itself and to the scientific community, and are fully reproducible.
At the moment the CPS is releasing the new long-term seismic hazard model (which will update the MPS04 model), annually produces the medium-term estimates, produces the daily update of the short-term estimates. At the end of an experimentation phase, an ad hoc site will be published by 2019 which will make all this data public.