Marco Mucciarelli

National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics - OGS · Centre for Seismological Research

Near-field recordings are very sensitive to the spatiotemporal details of the rupture process while far-field signals show the signature of the overall “point-source” earthquake mechanism. Near- and far-field recording ranges are dependent on the event magnitude and modulate the variability of the ground motion. This study investigates the ground m...

In this paper, we address the issue of evaluating the seismic site response for sites located on large alluvial plains, for which no reference sites can be identified, but some earthquakes can be simultaneously recorded at both surface and depth. In the proposed method, surface and borehole records are firstly used to assess the local 1D velocity m...

In the framework of the site characterisation of Italian accelerometric stations, our research unit took care of geological surveys and geophysical measurements at 14 stations in Southern Italy. With respect to the starting classification, based on Vs30 mostly assigned on purely geological bases, we found that many sites belong to a different soil...

Since 2002 the Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale (OGS) in Udine (Italy), the Agencija Republike Slovenije za Okolje (ARSO) in Ljubljana (Slovenia) and the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik (ZAMG) in Vienna (Austria), are collecting, analyzing, archiving and exchanging seismic data in real time, initially in...

A seismic event occurred on 11 May 2011 close to the town of Lorca (South-East Spain); despite the moderate magnitude (Mw=5.2), the damages were relevant. The largest PGA value (360 cm/s2) ever recorded so far in Spain was recorded at the accelerometric station located in Lorca (LOR), and it was explained as due to strong directivity effects rather...

The standard technique for single-station spectral ratio, or horizontal-to-vertical spectral ratio (HVSR) assumes that the maximum amplitude in presence of a resonant behaviour is on the horizontal plane with a minimum on the vertical direction. This assumption is reasonable if one suppose that seismic noise is composed by surface waves and that HV...

Immediately after an earthquake, a rapid estimation of the seismic impact is crucial to carrying out a prompt and appropriate Civil Protection response. This is particularly important in districts characterized by frequent and moderate-to-high seismicity, as is the case in the northeastern part of Italy. In this paper, the authors illustrate an inn...

We present the educational activities developed within a project that aims at disseminating the knowledge about seismic safety at high schools. SISIFO (SIcurezza SIsmica nella FOrmazione scolastica, that in English sounds like "seismic safety in school training"), is the name of the project and during the school year 2013-2014, fourteen high school...

"Io Non Rischio - Terremoto (INR-T)" ("I Do Not Take Risks - Earthquake") is an Italian communication campaign created and promoted by the Italian Department of Civil Protection (DPC), the National Association for Public Assistance (ANPAS), the Italian Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), and the Network of the University Laboratories of...

A primary school in Rotonda was monitored during an on-going seismic sequence in the Pollino area, Southern Italy. The Reinforced Concrete (RC) building is a typical three story building with a concrete frame, bearing pre-cast slab flooring, concrete block internal walls and pre-cast external infill slabs. The monitoring began in September 2011 wit...

On May 11, 2011 a moderate seismic event (Mw=5.2) struck the city of Lorca (SouthEast Spain) causing nine casualties, a large number of injured people and damages at the civil buildings. The largest PGA value (360 cm/s2) ever recorded so far in Spain, was observed at the accelerometric station located in Lorca (LOR), and it was explained as due to...

On May 11, 2011 a moderate seismic event (Mw=5.2) struck the city of Lorca (South-East Spain) causing nine casualties, a large number of injured people and damages at the civil buildings. The largest PGA value (360 cm/s2) ever recorded so far in Spain, was observed at the accelerometric station located in Lorca (LOR), and it was explained as due to...

Annual monitoring of the seismicity of the Friuli Venezia Giulia region

We present the educational activities developed within a project that aims at disseminating the knowledge about seismic safety at high schools. SISIFO (SIcurezza SIsmica nella FOrmazione scolastica, that in English sounds like “seismic safety in school training”), is the name of the project and during the school year 2013-2014, fourteen high school...

We propose a simple time-domain, non-parametric method to estimate the damping at the fundamental frequencyof a building. The method aims at obtaining quick-and-dirty data on large sets of buildings, at the expenses of the accuracy provided by other, more complex and resource-demanding techniques. The analysis of a 10 min recording of ambient vibra...

The seismic hazard resulting from seismicity induced by human activity is not yet regulated in Italy. The presence of a significant natural seismicity complicates the differentiation of events possibly induced by human activity from ordinary natural seismicity, while it stimulates a comparison between the ground motion that can be expected due to t...

The paper summarizes the activity carried out in a recent project aiming to apply updated methodologies to the seismic microzonation of the urban area of Mendoza (Argentina), located in a region characterized by high seismic activity and on deep recent alluvial deposits. Stratigraphic and geophysical data available from previous studies were integr...

While scientists are paying increasing attention to the seismicity potentially induced by hydrocarbon exploitation, so far, little is known about the reverse problem, i.e. the impact of active faulting and earthquakes on hydrocarbon reservoirs. The 20 and 29 May 2012 earthquakes in Emilia, northern Italy (Mw 6.1 and 6.0), raised concerns among the...

Earthquake Early Warning Systems (EEWS) are potentially effective tools for risk mitigation in active seismic regions. The present study explores the possibility of predicting the macroseismic intensity within EEW timeframes using the squared velocity integral (IV2) measured on the early P-wave signals, a proxy for the P-wave radiated energy of ear...

With the aim of monitoring the seismic activity in the eastern sector of the Alps, since 2001 OGS (Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale, Bragato et al., 2011) in Udine (Italy), the Agencija Republike Slovenije za Okolje (ARSO) in Ljubljana (Slovenia), the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik (ZAMG) in Vienna (Aus...

Since 2002, OGS (Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale) in Italy, the Agencija Republike Slovenije za Okolje (ARSO) in Slovenia, and the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik (ZAMG) in Austria are exchanging seismic data in real time. The data exchange is very effective for seismic events at the borders between Ita...

Tectonic earthquake swarms challenge our understanding of earthquake processes since it is difficult to link observations to the underlying physical mechanisms and to assess the hazard they pose. Transient forcing is thought to initiate and drive the spatio-temporal release of energy during swarms. The nature of the transient forcing may vary acros...

The region of central and eastern Europe is an area characterised by a relatively high seismic risk. Since 2001, to monitor the seismicity of this area, the OGS (Isti-tuto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale) in Italy, the Agencija Republike Slovenije za Okolje (ARSO) in Slovenia, the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geo-dynami...

The dynamic behavior of a rocky cliff under severe sea waves has been analyzed in the location of Polignano, facing on the Adriatic coast of Apulia, Southern Italy. In this area, the classical and, at the same time, complex problem of the stability of a cliff in calcareous rocks is burdened by the presence on the top of the cliff of the ancient tow...

Results of an extensive ambient vibration surveys carried out by different research teams in the area damaged by May–June 2012 seismic sequence in Emilia Romagna (Northern Italy) are summarized and analysed. In particular, ambient vibrations were acquired by both single station and seismic array configurations. Average horizontal to vertical spectr...

Analyses of changes in the fundamental frequency of a building is considered the simplest way to detect the onset of structural and non-structural damage. Several authors in the past proposed that the difference in periods that can be observed among ambient noise, and earthquake weak-motion measurements, can also be attributed to transient non-line...

The results of various sensitivity analysis in probabilistic seismic hazard assessment indicate that the greatest impacting parameters in the computations are the choice of the seismic zonations and the ground motion prediction relations used; how many zonations and which attenuation relations are used and how they are combined in the branches of a...

The selection of specific elastic response spectra according to soil categories is the standard to account for site effects in engineering design and general-purpose hazard maps. Most of the international seismic codes are based on the average shear wave velocity of the upper 30 m (Vs30) to discriminate between soil categories. The works of Borcher...

La risposta sismica in superficie nella valutazione ed adeguamento di edifici esistenti in C.A.: aspetti metodologici ed applicativi The seismic response at the surface in the assessment and retrofitting of RC existing buildings: methodological and practical aspects Sommario Con l'entrata in vigore delle Norme Tecniche per le Costruzioni del 2008,...

Heavy structural damage on buildings subjected to seismic motion is frequently due to torsional effects. These effects have been extensively studied in the last years and incorporated in seismic codes. The standard approach for the experimental evaluation of such effects involves the installation of a multi-channel accelerometric system on building...

While scientists are paying increasing attention to the seismicity potentially induced by hydrocarbon exploitation, little is known about the reverse problem, i.e. the impact of active faulting and earthquakes on hydrocarbon reservoirs. The recent 2012 earthquakes in Emilia, Italy, raised concerns among the public for being possibly human-induced,...

A probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) has been developed for selected sites located in Calabria (southern Italy) with the specific aim of accurately assessing the largest expected ground acceleration. The selected sites host hydroelectric dams that have to be seismically assessed, as requested by the Italian authority, and response spectra...

Aiming at the seismic risk mitigation in the eastern sector of the Alps, since 2002 OGS (Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale) in Udine (Italy), the Agencija Republike Slovenije za Okolje (ARSO) in Ljubljana (Slovenia) and the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik (ZAMG) in Vienna (Austria) are collecting, analyzi...

In recent times a great deal of research aimed to reduce of uncertainties in probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA). Most attention was paid to the role of ground motion prediction equations (GMPEs; see, e.g., Strasser et al., 2009), while no studies were devoted to a possible larger source of uncertainties: the historical catalogues of earth...

Since 2002 OGS (Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale) in Udine (Italy), the Agencija Republike Slovenije za Okolje (ARSO) in Ljubljana (Slovenia) and the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik (ZAMG) in Vienna (Austria), are collecting, analyzing, archiving and exchanging seismic data in real time. The data exchang...

We computed synthetic seismograms to get insights into the 2011 May 11 Lorca earthquake (Mw=5.2). This event was recorded also by twelve accelerometric stations located within a radius of 70 km from the source. One station (LOR) is quite close to the fault plane being located within 5 km on the hanging wall whilst four other accelerometric instrume...

This paper summarises the experience gathered on the field following four recent earthquakes: in 2009 at L’Aquila, Italy; in 2010 at Lorca, Spain; in 2011 at Christchurch, New Zealand; in 2012 at Emilia, Italy. These quakes provided useful lessons at the boundary between seismology and engineering, about the difference between what we expected to h...

9 Recent earthquakes in Italy and around the world have stressed, once more, the crucial role of education on seismic risk as a key point to raise awareness of seismic safety. After the 2002 San Giuliano di Puglia earthquake that caused the collapse of a school and the death of 26 children and their teacher, special attention was paid in Italy to t...

A probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) has been developed for selected sites located in northern Calabria with the specific aim of assessing very accurately the largest expected ground motion. The sites selected for the study host hydroelectric dams that must be seismically assessed as requested by Authority, based on Response Spectra and a...

Recent earthquakes, especially that of May 22, 2012 in the Ferrara region (northern Italy), have clearly pinpointed the effects of the vertical ground motions, especially in the near field. In fact, the most severe damage suffered by the industrial buildings was caused by a vertical peak ground acceleration (PGA) around 1 g, not expected in that ar...

ITALY An optimal global coverage of the Earth with broadband seismographic stations is still an objective far from being reached. It has been remarked by many authors that this is especially true in the southern hemisphere, where relevant information on medium and low level seismicity is lost due to the lack of an appropriate density of stations in...

PSHA for some dams in southern Italy

A damaging seismic sequence hit a wide area mainly located in the Emilia-Romagna region (Northern Italy) during 2012 with several events of local magnitude Ml ≥ 5, among which the Ml 5.9 May 20 and the Ml 5.8 May 29 were the main events. Thanks to the presence of a permanent accelerometric station very close to the epicentre and to the temporary in...

In recent times a great deal of research was aimed to the reduction of uncertainties on Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis (PSHA). Most attention was paid to the role of Ground Motion Prediction Equations (GMPEs), while no studies were devoted to a possible larger source of uncertainties: the historical catalogues of earthquakes. In areas where...

The region of the Central and Eastern Europe is an area characterised by a relatively high seismicity. The active seismogenic structures and the related potentially destructive events are located in the proximity of the political boundaries between several countries existing in the area. An example is the seismic region between the NE Italy (FVG, T...

Since 2002 the OGS (Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale) in Udine (Italy), the Agencija Republike Slovenije za Okolje (ARSO) in Ljubljana (Slovenia) and the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik (ZAMG) in Vienna (Austria) are collecting, analyzing, archiving and exchanging seismic data in real time. The data exch...

For many years, the Italian scientific community has faced the problem of the reduction of earthquake risk using innovative educational techniques. Recent earthquakes in Italy and around the world have clearly demonstrated that seismic codes alone are not able to guarantee an effective mitigation of risk. After the tragic events of San Giuliano di...

Since October 2010, a seismic swarm is affecting the Pollino mountain range (Basilicata and Calabria regions, southern Italy). While writing this paper the sequence is still ongoing, with more than 600 earthquakes perceived by the population having local magnitudes ML > 2.0. The population main fear is the risk that a destructive event could follow...

The Metaponto Coastal Plain (MCP), in southern Italy, stretches 60 km-long and 5 km-wide along the Gulf of Taranto in the Ionian Sea, and is presently subject to strong anthropogenic pressure. A multidisciplinary study reviewed the geomorphology, lithostratigraphy and sedimentology of the MCP and its subsurface. Incorporating both borehole and radi...

Il 20 maggio 2012 in Pianura Padana è iniziata una sequenza sismica che ha interessato una vasta area compresa tra le Province di Reggio Emilia, Modena, Mantova, Bologna e Ferrara. La prima forte scossa, di magnitudo locale M L =5,9, è avvenuta alle 4:03 ora locale, con epicentro tra Mirandola e Finale Emilia, seguita, nel giro di 4 minuti, da altr...

La legislazione della Regione Emilia-Romagna in materia di governo del territorio ha assegnato, sin dal 1978, alla programmazione territoriale e alla pianificazione urbanistica l'obiettivo della riduzione del rischio sismico, riconoscendo alle stesse il ruolo fondamentale di concorrere alla riduzione e prevenzione del rischio sismico fissando per l...

Metodo XNSR, derivato dal metodo HVSR, per la ricerca di un piano e della sua normale che diano un rapporto maX/minN

Introduction. During the seismic sequence still on-going in the Pollino area, Southern Italy, we monitored the Reinforced Concrete (RC) building of the school in Rotonda, a regular, three-stories reinforced concrete frame, floors in bearing precast slabs, internal walls in concrete bocks and external infills in precast slabs (Fig. 1). Since Octobe...

During the L’Aquila seismic sequence (Italy, 2009) we had the opportunity to install temporary accelerometric stations to study the role of seismic site amplification in damage enhancement. Two of the monitored sites, Castelnuovo and Navelli were also a good test for the recently introduced Italian seismic code (NTC08 2008) that prescribes an aggra...

This paper outlines the response of the healthcare system in the area mainly affected by the 2012 Emilia earthquake by drawing on specific surveys and information from local health authorities. Some hospitals were evacuated after the Ml = 5.8 May 20 seismic event due to damage to non structural components and minor structural damage. A short descri...

The aim of this paper is an empirical estimation of the fundamental period of reinforced concrete buildings and its variation due to structural and non-structural damage. The 2009 L'Aquila earthquake has highlighted the mismatch between experimental data and code provisions value not only for undamaged buildings but also for the damaged ones. The 6...

The aim of this paper is an empirical estimation of the fundamental period of reinforced concrete buildings and its variation due to structural and non-structural damage. The 2009, L’Aquila earthquake has highlighted the mismatch between experimental data and code provisions value not only for undamaged buildings but also for the damaged ones. The...

In questa lavoro i parametri del moto sismico dei segnali registrati al sito di Mirandola (MO) durante la sequenza sismica Emilia-2012 sono stati confrontati con quanto previsto dalla norma italiana NTC-2008. I confronti sono stati eseguiti considerando Ie stime di norma su suolo rigido amplificate sia per la classe di suolo (approccio semplificato...

The supply of natural gas and its storage are focal points of the Italian politics of energy production and will have increasing importance in the coming years. About a dozen reservoirs are currently in use and fifteen are in development or awaiting approval. Some of these are found in the vicinity of geological structures that are seismically acti...

Lessons learned from near-fault recordings of the Emilia, 2012 seismic sequence Marco Mucciarelli (CNR-OGS, Trieste, Italy) Leonardo Chiauzzi, Angelo Masi (Basilicata University, Potenza, Italy) Maria Rosaria Gallipoli, Tony Stabile (IMAA-CNR, Tito Scalo, Italy) Carmine Lizza, Luigi Vignola (Mallet s.r.l., Marsicovetere, Italy) The Emilia 2012 seis...

Italy is a country rich in hydropower, geothermal wells, extraction/reinjection of hydrocarbons, but surprisingly from 1964 to date only three papers have been published on the seismicity induced by dams, two on the problem of seismicity induced by reinjection of fluids and one that studies the effect on seismicity by the variation of the groundwat...

The ongoing seismic sequence on the Pollino mountain range (2010-2013, maximum magnitude 5.0) provides a test for possible precursory patterns both from seismic catalogue and other observations. In this paper more than two years of TIR anomaly maps - generated by applying the RST (Robust Satellite Technique) approach to MSG/SEVIRI data over Italy (...

The need for an effective seismic protection of buildings, and all the problems related to their management and maintenance over time, have led to a growing interest associated to develop of new integrated techniques for structural health monitoring and for damage detection and location during both ambient vibration and seismic events. It is well k...

The seismicity induced by human activities is a subject almost unknown in Italy, with an average of published works on the subject at a fraction of a percentage of what is being published abroad. The first part of this paper discusses the historical reasons for this lack of interest, while the second will examine the implications in terms of seismi...

A new reference probabilistic seismic hazard map of Italy was recently presented by Stucchi et al. (2011). The map represents the most recent development of the “Cornell‐McGuire” approach adopted in Italy in the last 20 years for hazard assessment and implements current models for epistemic uncertainty treatment. This comment does not address the p...

A seguito del terremoto dell’Emilia del 20 maggio 2012 (Ml = 5.9), un gruppo di ricercatori dell’Istituto di Metodologie per l’Analisi Ambientale del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (IMAA-CNR) di Tito (PZ), del Dipartimento di Strutture, Geotecnica e Geologia applicata all’Ingegneria dell’Università della Basilicata con il supporto di liberi pro...

INTRODUZIONE L'esigenza di un'efficace protezione sismica del costruito e le problematiche di gestione e manutenzione di un patrimonio strutturale ed infrastrutturale sempre più vasto ed invecchiato, hanno determinato un crescente interesse nei riguardi dello sviluppo di tecniche per il monitoraggio delle prestazioni strutturali e per l'identificaz...

p>Following the Ml 5.9 earthquake that struck the Emilia area in northern Italy on May 20, 2012, at 02:03:53 UTC, and in co-operation with the personnel of the Municipality of Ferrara and the University of Ferrara, a team of seismologists of the Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e Geofisica Sperimentale (OGS; National Institute of Oceanography and...

The more recent earthquake engineering research has highlighted the mismatch between experimental and theoretical period-height relationships not only for undamaged buildings but also for damaged ones. For the first time in Italy, after the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, we have estimated the fundamental periods of 48 RC buildings after a strong seismic...

The monitoring of the evolution of structural dynamic response under transient loads must be carried out to understand the physical behaviour of building subjected to earthquake ground motion, as well as to calibrate numerical models simulating their dynamic behaviour. Fourier analysis is one of the most used tools for estimating the dynamic charac...

On the evening of 13 January 2012, the cruise ship Costa Concordia left the port of Civitavecchia, near Rome (Italy), heading northwest toward the Italian port of Savona with 4,232 passengers and crew members aboard. A few hours later, while crossing the strait between the Island of Giglio in the Tuscan archipelago and the Monte Argentario peninsul...

The Fourier transform is certainly one of the main tools used to study the dynamic response of systems. This integral transformation is very useful and reliable if one wants to investigate the response of a stationary system, i.e. a system that doesn't changes its characteristics over time. On the contrary, when the study on the evolution of the dy...

One of the main tools used to study the dynamic response of structural systems is certainly the Fourier Transform. This tool is very useful and reliable to investigating the response of a stationary system, i.e. a generic system that does not changes its characteristics over time. Conversely, the Fourier Transform is no longer reliable if the main...

In the process of updating existing PSHA maps in Central Asia, a first step is the evaluation of the seismic hazard in terms of macroseismic intensity by applying a data driven method. Following the Site Approach to Seismic Hazard Assessment (SASHA) [11], the evaluation of the probability of exceedance of any given intensity value over a fixed expo...

A temporary seismic network composed of 11 stations was installed in the city of Potenza (Southern Italy) to record local and regional seismicity within the context of a national project funded by the Italian Department of Civil Protection (DPC). Some stations were moved after a certain time in order to increase the number of measurement points, le...

After the 2009 Abruzzo earthquake (Italy) several surface geophysical surveys were performed to support emergency microzonation studies. The most used technique was the Horizontal-to-Vertical Spectral Ratio applied to seismic ambient noise. More than 200 ambient vibration recordings were performed by using the Horizontal-to-Vertical Spectral Ratio...

In the last years, the behavior of landslides exposed to the seismic action has been the subject of different view as far as the role of seismic amplification is concerned. On one side, some authors provided simplified models based on 1D or 2D geometry of the sliding surface as the main factor controlling the frequency and amplification. On the oth...

Since October 2011 a seismic swarm is affecting the Pollino mountain range, southern Italy. At the abstract submission date the sequence is still ongoing, with more than 500 events with M>1, at least 40 well perceived by the population and a maximum magnitude at 3.6. The area was hit by a magnitude 5.7 event in 1998 that caused one dead, some injur...