Abstract
Abstract. Eastern Sicily is one of the coastal areas most exposed to earthquakes and tsunamis in Italy. The city of Catania that developed between the eastern base of Etna volcano and the Ionian Sea is, together with the neighbour coastal belt, under the strong menace of tsunamis. This paper addresses the estimation of the tsunami hazard for the city of Catania by using the technique of the Worst-case Credible Tsunami Scenario Analysis (WCTSA) and is focused on a target area including the Catania harbour and the beach called La Plaia where many human activities develop and many important structures are present. The aim of the work is to provide a detailed tsunami hazard analysis, firstly by building scenarios that are proposed on the basis of tectonic considerations and of the largest historical events that hit the city in the past, and then by combining all the information deriving from single scenarios into a unique aggregated scenario that can be viewed as the worst virtual scenario. Scenarios have been calculated by means of numerical simulations on computational grids of different resolutions, passing from 3 km on a regional scale to 40 m in the target area. La Plaia beach results to be the area most exposed to tsunami inundation, with inland penetration up to hundreds of meters. The harbour turns out to be more exposed to tsunami waves with low frequencies: in particular, it is found that the major contribution to the hazard in the harbour is due to a tsunami from a remote source, which propagates with much longer periods than tsunamis from local sources. This work has been performed in the framework of the EU-funded project SCHEMA.
Highlights
Catania lies in the middle of the eastern Sicily coast, one of the most seismic and tsunami-prone areas of the Mediterranean Sea
In this work we carry out an analysis of the Catania exposition to tsunamis based on the use of the Worst-case Credible Tsunami Scenario Analysis (WCTSA) that was developed within the framework of the activities of the EU-funded project SCHEMA
A WCTSA aiming at the evaluation of tsunami hazard for the city of Catania, eastern Sicily, Italy, has been performed
Summary
Catania lies in the middle of the eastern Sicily coast, one of the most seismic and tsunami-prone areas of the Mediterranean Sea. In this work we carry out an analysis of the Catania exposition to tsunamis based on the use of the Worst-case Credible Tsunami Scenario Analysis (WCTSA) that was developed within the framework of the activities of the EU-funded project SCHEMA (http://www.schemaproject.org). On the contrary, when there are reasons to believe that even non-seismic tsunamigenic sources can play a role for a given target area, using a WCTSA method is strongly recommendable This is the main motivation why the WCTSA technique has been adopted to assess the tsunami hazard for the city of Catania. Four of them are based on two local events that occurred in 1693 and 1908; the other three are built on a remote source located in the western Hellenic Arc and are based on a tsunami event
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