ALBERT

Description: Macroseismology plays a crucial role in earthquake hazard and risk analyses, tying earthquake occurrences and impacts from the past with those of the present and future. The use of macroseismic intensity has grown as the hazard layer within essential USGS and others’ real-time information products and even in presenting hazard maps in a form friendlier to nontechnical users. However, even with best practices, there are limitations to modern macroseismic data collection approaches. Whereas crowd-sourced intensities are robust for lower levels, they are poorly defined above intensity VII, where damage assessment requires knowledge of each building’s structural system. Likewise, the United States, New Zealand, and others employ the Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) scale, which is consistent with—yet inferior to—the more recently developed European Macroseismic Scale (EMS-98). We report on an IMS Working Group meeting held in October 2022 at the USGS Powell Center to address these and other issues and to work towards an IMS. Workshop goals were, first, to harmonize the MMI scale with EMS-98 for the US and NZ—which share several similar building types—by considering those structures and associated damage grades not well represented in the current EMS-98 building vulnerability table. Second, formalize the process of augmenting EMS-98 with vulnerability classes appropriate for building types in other countries, thus promoting a scale that can be employed globally. Such efforts require expanding the EMS-98 explanatory documents. Lastly, we discuss how standardized earthquake-damage data collection worldwide—as part of an IMS—could facilitate hazard and risk analyses.

Description: This catalogue is the extended version of “The European-Mediterranean Earthquake Catalogue (EMEC) for the last millennium” (Grünthal and Wahlstrom, 2012, 2012a). It is an earthquake catalogue for tectonic events in the broader European Mediterranean area. It reached from the Azores (Mid-Atlantic Ridge) in the west, to Africa north of the Sahara in the south, the Arctic Sea in the north, and the regions of Levant, eastern Turkey, and the Caucasus in the west. This areal coverage gave the name to the catalogue: EMEC—The European-Mediterranean Earthquake Catalogue. It extends the previous version (Grünsthal and Wahlström, 2012), by the years 2007 to 2021 and thus contains tectonic events for the period AD 1000 to 2021 with a uniform magnitude Mw from the threshold of 3.5. The dataset contains 71271 entries.