The RAMONES Service for Rapid Assessment of Seismic Moment and Radiated Energy in Central Italy: Concepts, Capabilities, and Future Perspectives

Abstract

We present Rapid Assessment of MOmeNt and Energy Service (RAMONES), a service for disseminating through a web interface, the estimates of seismic moment (⁠M0⁠) and radiated energy (⁠ER⁠) for earthquakes occurring in central Italy with local magnitudes above 1.7. The service is based on a fully‐automatic procedure developed for downloading and processing open seismological data from the European Integrated Data Archive, Italian Civil Protection repository, and Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS). In its actual configuration, RAMONES uses the seismic catalog generated through the event webservice of the Italian Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (compliant with International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks standards) to guide the data download. The concept of RAMONES is to estimate M0 and ER from features extracted directly from recordings, namely the S‐wave peak displacement (⁠PDS⁠) and the integral of the squared velocity (⁠IV2S⁠) evaluated over the S‐wave window at local distances. A data set composed of 6515 earthquakes recorded in central Italy between 2008 and 2018 was used to calibrate the attenuation models relating M0 to PDS and ER to IV2S⁠, including station corrections. The calibration values for M0 and ER were extracted from the source spectra obtained by applying a decomposition approach to the Fourier amplitude spectra known as the generalized inversion technique. To test the capabilities of RAMONES, we validate the attenuation models by performing residual analysis over about 60 earthquakes occurring in 2019 that were used for the spectral decomposition analysis but not considered in the calibration phase. Since January 2020, a testing operational phase has been running, and RAMONES has analyzed about 800 earthquakes by September 2020. The distribution of the source parameters and their relevant scaling relationships are automatically computed and disseminated in the form of maps, parametric tables, figures, and reports available through the RAMONES web interface.