SERA-NA5 description

SERA project

The "Seismology and Earthquake Engineering Research Infrastructure Alliance for Europe" (SERA, http://www.sera-eu.org/en/home/) aims to reduce the risk posed by natural and anthropogenic earthquakes based on innovative research and development projects. Five work packages within SERA are dedicated towards networking activities, whose aim is to pool know-how and create frameworks for facilitating exchange among professionals and researchers from different fields.

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SERA-NA5 "Networking databases of site and station characterization"

The site characterization of rock and soil properties is a need shared by various applications in seismology and geotechnical engineering, ranging from (i) the site characterization of seismic stations, to (ii) the calibration of strong-motion records for the assessment of attenuation relationships (GMPE), (iii) the assessment of local site amplifications for realistic shaking estimates and for site-specific hazard assessment for critical infrastructures, and (iv) the soil classification for building code applications. A number of initiatives and projects (including NERA) have worked on all these various aspects, but we do not yet have a common way to exchange data and calibrations across the different disciplines.

Within this context, the SERA-NA5 "Networking databases of site and station characterization" work package aims at proposing a reliable and efficient European framework for site characterization in close connection with actual and future requirements of seismic hazard and risk stakeholders (seismic network operators, earthquake seismologists and engineers, Eurocode 8).

• Network and structure of the European site characterization community
• Foster internationally recognized site condition metadata
• Develop a 10 year road map for the systematic assessment and archiving at European scale of geological and geotechnical site characterization, including basin and topographic effects, non-linear effect
• Propose best practice and standards for site characterisation and quality assessment
• Review and integrate newly developed site condition proxies in site characterization metadata

SERA-NA5 is run by the following partners: CNRS-ISTerre (France), INGV (Italy), AUTH (Greece) and ETH Zurich (Switzerland).

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The L'Aquila workshop is organized within the scopes of Tasks 2 and Task 3 of SERA-NA5.

Task 7.2 Best practice and site characterization quality assessment

Available site characterization schemes and quality control criteria for site characterization will be reviewed in close collaboration with network operators, earthquake engineering community and EC8 responsible. We will then focus on the definition of (a) best practice guidelines for site characterization at rock sites (including topography effects) and soft soils (including non-linear and basin effects), and (b) high-quality standard for quality assessment on site characterization target to network operators and seismological and engineering communities.

Task 7.3 Road map for strong motion site characterization in Europe

In addition to reporting strong motion stations that have already a robust, reliable and complete site characterization, this task will focus on prioritizing the list of the most critical strong motion stations or sites in Europe that will need to be partially or fully characterized within the next 10 years in order to reach the common high-quality standards . Such site selection will be driven by issues and needs related to spectrum-compatible waveforms for the magnitude-distance ranges of earthquakes relevant in PSHA, the development of reference rock/soil velocity profiles for region specific GMPEs, vs-kappa adjustments between different reference profiles for host-to-target adjustments and site-specific hazard assessment.