Abstract
The 2013 European Seismic Hazard Model (ESHM13) results from a community-based probabilistic seismic hazard assessment supported by the EU-FP7 project “Seismic Hazard Harmonization in Europe” (SHARE, 2009–2013). The ESHM13 is a consistent seismic hazard model for Europe and Turkey which overcomes the limitation of national borders and includes a through quantification of the uncertainties. It is the first completed regional effort contributing to the “Global Earthquake Model” initiative. It might serve as a reference model for various applications, from earthquake preparedness to earthquake risk mitigation strategies, including the update of the European seismic regulations for building design (Eurocode 8), and thus it is useful for future safety assessment and improvement of private and public buildings. Although its results constitute a reference for Europe, they do not replace the existing national design regulations that are in place for seismic design and construction of buildings. The ESHM13 represents a significant improvement compared to previous efforts as it is based on (1) the compilation of updated and harmonised versions of the databases required for probabilistic seismic hazard assessment, (2) the adoption of standard procedures and robust methods, especially for expert elicitation and consensus building among hundreds of European experts, (3) the multi-disciplinary input from all branches of earthquake science and engineering, (4) the direct involvement of the CEN/TC250/SC8 committee in defining output specifications relevant for Eurocode 8 and (5) the accounting for epistemic uncertainties of model components and hazard results. Furthermore, enormous effort was devoted to transparently document and ensure open availability of all data, results and methods through the European Facility for Earthquake Hazard and Risk ( www.efehr.org ).
Highlights
Probabilistic seismic hazard assessment (PSHA) has become the most common and standardized procedure to address the seismic threat that society faces
In the remaining seismogenic areas, normally characterised by high seismicity level and by a better understanding of historical seismicity and seismogenic sources, the distribution of Mmax was anchored to the larger value between the largest earthquake reported in the catalogue and the maximum magnitude expected based on the fault database, again with consideration of its uncertainty; this procedure was repeated in each AS in the active regions or in each superzone for oceanic crust, mid-Atlantic ridge and Azores-Gibraltar zones
The ESHM13 delivered by the Seismic Hazard Harmonization in Europe” (SHARE) project is the first regional and community-based effort that was completed since the conclusion of the Global Seismic Hazard Assessment Program and of the SESAME program (GSHAP, Giardini 1999; Jimenez et al 2001)
Summary
Despite the current importance of PGA in Eurocode 8, there are a number of other outputs of a PSHA that can and should be used in seismic design, including the uniform hazard spectra (UHS) for a range of return periods and the disaggregation of spectral ordinates in terms of the magnitude, distance and epsilon of the controlling earthquakes Due to this direct connection to seismic design codes, PSHA has gained a central role in engineering applications, seismic risk analysis and the definition of the design basis ground-motions. The project “Seismic Hazard Harmonization in Europe” (SHARE) was planned to overcome such differences and to benefit from the latest improvements in input data sets, from new approaches in modelling earthquake sources, and from a new generation of ground motion measurements and attenuation models This project was conceived in 2007, submitted to the European Community in 2008 and funded in 2009 for a period of 3.5 years.
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