Seismic hazard in southern Calabria (Italy) based on the analysis of a synthetic earthquake catalog

Abstract

The application of a newly developed physics-based earthquake simulator to the active faults inferred by aeromagnetism in southern Calabria has produced a synthetic catalog lasting 100 ky including more than 18,000 earthquakes of magnitude C 4.0. This catalog exhibits temporal, spatial and magnitude features, which resemble those of the observed seismicity. As an example of the potential use of synthetic catalogs, a map of the peak ground acceleration (PGA) for a given exceedance probability on the territory under investigation has been produced by means of a simple attenuation law applied to all the events reported in the synthetic catalog. This map was compared with the existing hazard map that is presently used in the national seismic building regulations. The comparison supports a strong similarity of our results with the values given in the present Italian seismic building code, despite the latter being based on a different methodology. The same similarity cannot be recognized for the comparison of our present study with the results obtained from a previous study based on our same methodology but with a different geological model.

Strong Earthquakes Recurrence Times of the Southern Thessaly, Greece, Fault System: Insights from a Physics-Based Simulator Application

“…Over the years, the simulation algorithm had a revolutionary improvement, comprising new parameters for the identification of successive ruptures (Console et al, 2017) and the inclusion of the afterslip process, modeled by a decaying Omori-like power law (Console et al, 2018a). These improved versions were successfully applied to simulate the seismicity of Calabria (Console et al, 2017;Console et al, 2018b) and Central Apennines (Console et al, 2018a) in Italy. The latest version of the algorithm incorporates the effect of the Rate and State Constitutive law proposed by Dieterich 1994 in the physical processes, leading to a stochastic manner of nucleation with applications in Central Italy (Console et al, 2020) and Greece (Mangira et al, 2020).…”