Skip to main content
EnglishEN
European Commission logo print header

A basic European earthquake catalogue and a database for the evaluation of long-term seismicity and seismic hazard

Objective

To prepare a basic earthquake catalogue of Europe, with special reference to long-term
seismicity, and a database of primary data. This dataset will provide a tool for understanding
the time/space seismicity patterns and a reliable input for seismic hazard assessment.


The seismicity in Europe is rather uneven: the knowledge of it is also uneven,
due to the fact that seismicity is currently investigated at a national level
(in some cases even at a sub-national level) and that no systematic,
European-size investigation of the period before 1800 has been undertaken so
far. National catalogues differ in compilation philosophy, time-window, quality
of primary data, parameterisation procedures, format, updating; some are
published, some not; in general it is very difficult to state the type and
quality of the dataset from which they are compiled.

This project will first retrieve and merge the sets of primary information into
a single dataset; this dataset will integrate, for the first time at a European
level, uniformly assessed data of earthquakes across national frontiers. As a
first step a "working file" will be created by selecting and merging the
national/regional catalogues and performing a preliminary screening, in order to
select the most significant earthquakes for each area. A survey will then be
performed in order to retrieve the existing dataset related to each selected
event; earthquakes for which data are poor or no dataset is available will be
investigated, in order to ensure a minimum level of information.

The next step, the evaluation of earthquake parameters and the catalogue
compilation will be performed by processing the new dataset according to uniform
criteria. In such a way a new catalogue will be compiled and it will be used for
preliminary hazard assessment, in order to evaluate both the progress allowed by
the new data and the areas/time-windows which require further investigation.

Fields of science

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Call for proposal

Data not available

Funding Scheme

CSC - Cost-sharing contracts

Coordinator

Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
Address
15,via bassini
20133 Milano
Italy

See on map
EU contribution
€ 0,00

Participants (8)

Share this page

Download

Last update: 5 May 1997

My Booklet

Permalink: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/EV5V0497

European Union, 2023