This paper presents the overall procedure followed in order to assemble the most recent pan-European strong-motion databank: Reference Database for Seismic Ground-Motion in Europe (RESORCE). RESORCE is one of the products of the SeIsmic Ground Motion Assessment (SIGMA; projet-sigma.com) project. RESORCE is intended to be a single integrated accelerometric databank for Europe and surrounding areas for use in the development and testing of ground-motion models and for other engineering seismology and earthquake engineering applications. RESORCE aims to contribute to the improvement of earthquake risk studies in Europe and surrounding areas. RESORCE principally updates and extends the previous pan-European strong-motion databank (Ambraseys et al. in Bollettino di Geofisica Teorica ed Applicata 45:113-129, 2004a) with recently compiled Greek, Italian, Swiss and Turkish accelerometric archives. The updates also include earthquake-specific studies published in recent years. The current content of RESORCE includes 5,882 multi-component and uniformly processed accelerograms from 1,814 events and 1,540 strong-motion stations. The moment magnitude range covered by RESORCE is {Mathematical expression}. The source-to-site distance interval extends to 587 km and distance information is given by the common point- and extended-source distance measures. The paper presents the current features of RESORCE through simple statistics that also quantify the differences in metadata and strong-motion processing with respect to the previous version of the pan-European strong-motion databank

[1] The thermal and compositional structure of the upper mantle beneath the North American continent is investigated using a joint inversion of seismic velocities and density perturbations. The velocity data consist of a new regional shear wave velocity model of North America and the Caribbean region obtained by surface wave tomography. The density data are estimated using a relative density-to-shear velocity scaling factor computed for continents by combining regionally filtered seismic and gravity data. We express the mineralogical variations in the mantle in terms of the global volumic fraction of iron, the parameter which has the strongest influence on density and velocity. The inferred thermal and iron content anomalies are well constrained by the data and show an age dependence down to a depth of 230 ± 50 km. Below the North American craton, the mantle is colder than average and depleted in iron. Maximum values are found at 100 km with dT = À440 K and dFe = À4%, relative to the average mantle. These chemical and thermal characteristics induce opposite buoyancy forces which could explain the longevity of cratonic lithosphere. In stable continental areas, the signal is of lower amplitudes (dT = À280 K and dFe = À2.5% at 100 km). Beneath the western Cordillera, a tectonically active region, we see no significant thermal or chemical anomaly.

International audienceThe aim of the SI-Hex project (acronym for « Sismicité Instrumentale de l’Hexagone ») is to provide a catalogue of seismicity for metropolitan France and the French marine economic zone for the period 1962–2009 by taking into account the contributions of the various seismological networks and observatories from France and its neighbouring countries. The project has been launched jointly by the Bureau Central Sismologique Français (CNRS-University/BCSF) and the Laboratoire de Détection et de Géophysique (CEA-DAM/LDG). One of the main motivations of the project is to provide the end user with the best possible information on location and magnitude of each earthquake. So far, due to the various procedures in use in the observatories, the different locations and magnitudes of earthquakes located in the SI-Hex zone were presenting large discrepancies. In the 2014 version of the catalogue, 1D localizations of hypocentres performed with a unique computational scheme and covering the whole 1962–2009 period constitute the backbone of the catalogue (SI-Hex solutions). When available, they are replaced by more precise localizations made at LDG or, for recent times, by the regional observatories within: 1) the French Alps, 2) the southernmost Alps and the Mediterranean domain including Corsica, 3) the Pyrenees, and 4) the Armorican massif. Moment magnitudes Mw are systematically reported in the SI-Hex catalogue. They are computed from coda-wave analysis of the LDG records for most Mw>3.4 events, and are converted from local magnitudes ML for smaller magnitude events. Finally, special attention is paid to the question of discrimination between natural and artificial seismic events in order to produce a catalogue for direct use in seismic hazard analysis and seismotectonic investigations. The SI-Hex catalogue is accessible on the web site www.franceseisme.fr and contains 38,027 earthquake hypocentres, together with their seismic moment magnitudes Mw