The Italian Accelerometric Archive (ITACA): processing of strong-motion data

Abstract

The Italian strong-motion database was created during a joint project between Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV, Italian Institute for Geophysics and Vulcanology) and Dipartimento della Protezione Civile (DPC, Italian Civil Protection). The aim of the project was the collection, homogenization and distribution of strong motion data acquired in Italy in the period 1972-2004 by different institutions, namely Ente Nazionale per l’Energia Elettrica (ENEL, Italian electricity company), Ente per le Nuove tecnologie, l’Energia e l’Ambiente (ENEA, Italian energy and environment organization) and DPC. Recently the strong-motion data relative to the 23th December 2009, Parma (Mw=5.4 and Mw=4.9) and to the 2009 L’Aquila sequence (13 earthquakes with 4.1Mw6.3) were included in the ITACA database (beta release). The database contains 7038 waveforms from analog and digital instruments, generated by 1019 earthquakes with magnitude up to 6.9 and can be accessed on-line at the web site http://itaca.mi.ingv.it. The strong motion data are provided in the unprocessed and processed versions. This article describes the steps followed to process the acceleration time series recorded by analogue and digital instruments. The procedures implemented involve: baseline removal, instrumental correction, band pass filtering with acausal filters, integration of the corrected acceleration in order to obtain velocity and displacement waveforms, computation of acceleration response spectra and strong motion parameters. This procedure is applied to each accelerogram, is realised to preserve the low frequency content of the records.