Seismology - Use Cases

Definition of seismic and tsunami hazard scenarios by exploiting EU-IndiaGrid e-infrastructures

Seismic risk mitigation is a worldwide concern and the development of effective mitigation strategies requires sound seismic hazard assessment. The performances of the classical probabilistic approach to seismic hazard assessment (PSHA), currently in use in several countries worldwide, turned out fatally inadequate when considering the earthquakes occurred worldwide during the last decade, including the recent destructive earthquake in Japan (M 9.0, 11 March 2011).

Nowadays it is recognised by the engineering community that probabilistic Peak Ground Acceleration estimates alone are not sufficient for the adequate design of special buildings and infrastructures, since displacements play a critical role and the dynamical analysis of the structure response requires complete time series of ground motion. Moreover, when dealing with the protection of critical structures (e.g. nuclear power plants) and cultural heritage, where it is necessary to consider extremely long time intervals, the standard PSHA estimates are by far unsuitable, due to their basic heuristic limitations.

The use of the neo-deterministic seismic hazard assessment (NDSHA) methodologies has been recently enabled on the EU-IndiaGrid2 computational infrastructures, based on GRID computing paradigms. Such e-Infrastructure provides an innovative and unique approach to address this problem. It demonstrated to be an efficient way to
share and access resources of different types, which can effectively enhance the capability to define realistic scenarios of seismic ground motion. Intensive usage of these infrastructure may enable scientists to compute a wide set of synthetic seismograms, dealing efficiently with variety and complexity of the potential earthquake sources, and the implementation of parametric studies to characterize the related uncertainties.

A Cooperation Project, aimed at the definition of seismic and tsunami hazard scenarios in the Gujarat region (India), by means of indo-european e-infrastructures, has been recently funded by the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region (Italy). The project aims to set up a system for the seismic characterization, integrated with the e-infrastructures distributed amongst India and Europe, to allow for the optimization of the computation of the ground shaking and tsunami scenarios.

This goal will be attained thanks to the strict connection with the European project EU-IndiaGrid2 that provides the necessary infrastructure.

Abstract: Definition of seismic and tsunami hazard scenarios by exploiting EU-IndiaGrid
Antonella Peresan, Franco Vaccari, Andrea Magrin, Giuliano F. Panza
Department of Geosciences, University of Trieste, via Weiss 4, 34127. Trieste, Italy. The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, ICTP SAND Group. Trieste, Italy
Stefano Cozzini
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto Officina dei Materiali, CNR/IOM uos Democritos. Trieste – Italy