Engineering Strong-Motion database: a gateway to access European strong motion data

Abstract

The repeated attempts of building unified European strong-motion databases are motivated by the increasing demand of strong motion data, that are one of the primary sources of information used by engineering seismologists and earthquake engineers to predict ground shaking. We describe the Engineering strong-motion database (esm.mi.ingv.it), implemented during the NERA project (www.nera-eu.org, 2010-2014), within the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission, that has recently become an infrastructure of EPOS (European Plate Observing System, www.epos-eu.org). This infrastructure represents a bridge between present and past; on one side it exploits the most advanced technical solutions adopted by network operators for data distribution, and, on the other, preserves important strong-motion data mainly recorded by analogue instruments before 2000. In this way the database can be continuously updated with real-time data, but also with offline data, as soon as they become available. Moreover, it has been specifically designed to provide end-users (engineers and scientists alike) quality-checked, uniformly processed data and tools for data selection. ESM is composed by a centralized database, with a core formed by about 80 tables, with a web interface and several tools in order to: i) search data from online archives and catalogues, ii) populate the database, iii) perform quality control and iv) process accelerometric data online. The underlying IT framework is tailored on the peculiarity of strong-motion data, that need the support of a variety of metadata on seismic events and recording stations to be fully exploited for engineering applications (e. g. derivation of ground motion prediction equations, selection of accelerograms compatible with code spectra, derivation of seismic codes).