Combining USGS ShakeMaps and the OpenQuake-engine for damage and loss assessment

Summary

The evaluation of the potential impact of strong seismic events shortly after their occurrence is a critical step to organise emergency response and consequently minimise the adverse effects of earthquakes. The estimation of the impact from earthquakes considering the observed ground shaking from past events can be useful for the calibration of existing exposure and/or fragility and vulnerability models. This study describes a methodology to combine the publicly available information from the USGS ShakeMap system and the open-source software OpenQuake engine for the assessment of damage and losses. This approach is employed to estimate the number of structural collapses considering the 2012 
Magnitude 5.9 Emilia-Romagna (Italy) earthquake and the aggregated economic loss because of the 2010 Magnitude 7.1 Darfield (New Zealand) event. Several techniques to calculate the ground shaking in the affected region considering the spatial and interperiod correlations in the intra-event groundmotion residuals are investigated and their influence in the resulting damage or loss estimates are evaluated.