EPSI: Earthquake parameters and standardized information for a European-Mediterranean bulletin

• Research unit: EU RFP
• Project number: 99.0848

Key words (English)

Europe; seismology; bulletin; magnitude

Alternative project number (English)

EU project number: EVR1-2000-40006

Research programs (English)

EU-programme: 5. Frame Research Programme - 1.4a.2 Global change, climate and biodiversity

Short description (English)

See abstract

Partners and International Organizations (English)

Coordinator: European Mediterranean Seismological Centre (F)

Abstract (English)

The main objective of the EPSI Project has been to start the production of the European-Mediterranean seismological bulletin. The production has started before the end of the project and results are regularly made available on the Internet. The year 2002 is currently being processed and the EPSI project can today be considered as successful. The software development have been completed, they have been tested, validated and being made operational and data exchange have been broaden far beyond the EMSC members. Furthermore, a number of organisations which now contribute to the Euro.-Med. bulletins had never made their data available before. This is a significant step towards a more complete integration of the seismological community at a European-Mediterranean scale.
Defining a Reference Magnitude
In the previous reporting period, the moment magnitude scale as been identified as the scale for a unified magnitude. The EPSI project has allowed the definition of a clear two-steps-strategy to solve this difficult issue: The first step concerns the estimation of regional seismic wave attenuation to implement relevant correction before the Mw computation. The coda magnitude studies carried out in this project have proved to be an efficient and rapid way to derive satisfactory regional attenuation values for correction. This approach will be the basis for a user-friendly robust freeware to be widely distributed to the contributing networks. The second step will be to provide a second freeware, which would integrate the results of the attenuation study and compute, alongside the magnitude in use, the moment magnitude.
Locating Seismic Events in Border Regions
All the initial tasks of this WP had been completed in the previous reporting periods. Nevertheless, in the last reporting period the analysis was extended to new border regions: the Greek-Albanian and the Greek-Turkish borders. Despite the efforts, we have not been able to gather a high-quality-dataset large enough to analyse the Greek-Turkish border and the ISC catalogue does not include enough close stations.
Producing a European-Mediterranean Bulletin
A 4 months test bulletin has been computed from March to June 2002 (800 events) and analysed by each of the partner. No phantom events were detected. The missing events of the Euro.-Med. bulletin were either due to gaps in the database used to compute the bulletin or the location was considered as not valid because of a large azimuthal gap. Some modifications were implemented to properly handle the type of event (e.g. known explosion). Finally, in order to improve the depth resolution, the location process uses a larger number of trial depths. The overall ambitious goal of this 27 months project was to start the production on an operational basis of the European-Mediterranean bulletin. This production has started on December 9th 2002 and consequently the project has been successful.
Servicing the Public
New information has been made available on both the EPSI web site (http://www.emsc-csem.org/Html/EPSI_home.html) and at the specific web site for the WP2 (http://www.ingv.it/~roma/reti/epsi/index.htm). In the latter, one can find all the results concerning the border regions which have been analysed. On the EPSI web page, the following information has been added:
· Data availability
· Slides of several presentations and copy of posters presenting the EPSI project
· Results of the European-Mediterranean bulletin

References in databases (English)

Swiss Database: Euro-DB of the
State Secretariat for Education and Research
Hallwylstrasse 4
CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland
Tel. [phone]
Swiss Project-Number: 99.0848