Abstract
The investigation of the records of past earthquakes in Europe and in other countries of the world produced in recent years a large amount of information, such as historical seismicity studies, earthquake catalogues and collections of intensity data points. The rapid growth of computerized information systems allowed for management of data in digital form, while the evolution of Information and Communication Technologies initiated a new era of sharing, transferring and disseminating the output of this investigation. This paper outlines the availability and use of collections of intensity data points which are increasingly being offered to users through Internet such as: DOM and CFTI, Italy; SISFRANCE, France; ECOS, Switzerland; EMID, a starting point towards a European-Mediterranean Intensity Database; NGDC/NOAA database, US; CERESIS catalogue, South America.
Highlights
The boost that historical seismology has been given in the last twenty years, the rapid development of Information and Communication Technology since the mid 90s and the will to invest in information dissemination initiatives allow us to have at our disposal a wealth of information about long-term seismicity over the Internet.This information consists of several categories; a preliminary inventory performed in the framework of the initiatives for the dissemination of long-term seismicity data of the European Mediterranean Seismological Centre EMSC/CSEM lists dozens of pointers to online resources provided by more than twenty institutions in the European-Mediterranean area
IDPs collections are of unquestionable value: on the one hand they expand the information synthesized in earthquake catalogues, allowing to access the reliability of the catalogue records themselves, and to better understand long-term seismicity, and on the other, they serve as input for further analysis, such as seismic hazard evaluation; IDPs can be profitably used to determine preliminary models of seismogenic sources and calibrate seismic hazard estimates; for example see respectively Gasperini et al (1999) and Mucciarelli et al (2000), exploiting the Italian intensity databases described in this paper
A review of earthquake intensity databanks released over the Internet in the second half of the 1990’s and currently available has been presented
Summary
The boost that historical seismology has been given in the last twenty years, the rapid development of Information and Communication Technology since the mid 90s and the will to invest in information dissemination initiatives allow us to have at our disposal a wealth of information about long-term seismicity over the Internet. The web page with the retrieved data includes: the earthquake record with main parameters, a multiple choice list of available comments about the earthquake, the list of references, the list of observations with locality name, coordinates, and intensity at site. Both reference and observation lists can be saved on disk, for further use and analysis. Its «identity» is summarized in a «card» providing date and type of event (aftershock, foreshock, main shock, or sequence), epicentral area, epicentral coordinates and epicentral intensities with associated reliability codes for values; the corresponding intensity data points are displayed on request in tabular form as the «observations list», or are plotted on a macroseismic map The catalogue – not the whole database – with related explanations, is downloadable
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