Variation of human perceptiveness of earthquakes during seismic sequences

Abstract

This paper describes the variation of the human perception of earthquakes under the peculiar condition of seismic sequence occurrence. To this aim, we chose and have analyzed four seismic sequences that reflect the most common models of seismicity occurrence in the Italian territory. Our data always refer to the epicentral area, so that the contribution of the epicentral distance to the earthquake sensitiveness is considered constant. To search for recurrent behavior of people in the perception of earthquakes, we crossed seismological data to sensitivity data coming from the archives of the Italian Civil Protection. In each sequence, we individuate a number of “indicators”, such as the rate between felt and not-felt events and the minimum magnitude for which 100% of the events are felt. Such indicators are proportional to the energy released by the sequence and can be particularly affected by the time protraction of the sequence, and/or by the different familiarity with the seismic phenomenon, and/or by the intensity of the emotional impact of a seismic crisis. The observed trends of sensitiveness show a significant variation of the people perceptivity within the sequence development. From the analysis of the dataset, one can distinguish the variation of perceptivity due to emotional factors from those due to physical factors. An important observation, which is confirmed by a statistical analysis, is that the source depth does not affect the perceptiveness of earthquakes. Finally, we find important differences between on-sequence and off-sequence human perceptiveness that are connected with the different levels of alert.