The L’Aquila earthquake—A view of site effects and building behavior from temporary networks

The idea of this Special Issue comes from a “joint venture” of research groups from several Italian and European Institutions (Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanolo- gia and University of Basilicata, Italy; GeoForschungsZentrum-GFZ, Germany; CETE Méditerranée—LRPC Nice and OCA-UMR Géoazur, France) which carried out a large seismic survey for site effect estimation in the wide area hit by the 2009 L’Aquila, Italy, earthquake (Fig. 1).
The Mw 6.3 mainshock of April 6th, 2009, represented the most damaging event in Italy since the 1980 Irpinia earthquake (Mw 6.9). Several large aftershocks (Mw > 5) and thousands of smaller events occurred in the following months and the deployment of differ- ent rapid response seismic networks from Italy, France and Germany allowed the scientific community to collect a very large and high quality data set, probably the largest ever acquired during a normal fault seismic sequence (Marzorati et al. 2011).