Assessment of seismic hazard for the Sannio-Matese area of Southern Italy ? A summary

Abstract

The working group on ‘Test Regions for Evaluation of Methods for Seismic Hazard Assessment in Europe (TERESA)’, consisted of 15 members from 10 different European countries. Methods and experience gathered in these countries have been compared and discussed for two test areas in Europe: the Sannio-Matese region, Southern Italy, with high seismic activity, and the border region between Belgium, The Netherlands, and Federal Republic of Germany, with low activity. This paper summarizes the results for one of the test areas, Sannio-Matese. Most of the participants used statistical procedures to assess earthquake hazard, receiving results in terms of probability of occurrence for intensity as the ground-motion parameter. It was found that careful preparation of input data and parameters is the major influencing factor, therefore most of the efforts of the working group was devoted to this task. The scatter of the obtained results of the group is considerable, mainly because of the uncertainties in the data and the subjectiveness involved in the procedures. For better control of both factors, more objective methods have to be developed.