A completeness analysis of the National Seismic Network of Italy

Abstract

We present the first detailed study of earthquake detection capabilities of the Italian National Seismic Network and of the completeness threshold of its earthquake catalog. The network in its present form started operating on 16 April 2005 and is a significant improvement over the previous networks. For our analysis, we employed the PMC method as introduced by Schorlemmer and Woessner (2008). This method does not estimate completeness from earthquake samples as traditional methods, mostly based on the linearity of earthquake size distributions. It derives detection capabilities for each station of the network and synthesizes them into maps of detection probabilities for earthquakes of a given magnitude. Thus, this method avoids the many assumptions about earthquake distributions that traditional methods make. The results show that the Italian National Seismic Network is complete at M = 2.9 for the entire territory excluding the islands of Sardinia, Pantelleria, and Lampedusa. At the M = 2.5 level, which is the reporting threshold level of the Italian Civil Protection, the network may miss events in southern parts of Apulia and the western part of Sicily. The stations are connected through many different telemetry links to the operational data center in Rome. Scenario computations show that no significant drop in completeness occurs if one of the three major links fails, indicating a well‐balanced network setup.