Operational earthquake loss forecasting in Italy: preliminary results

The geophysical research community is currently focusing on operational earthquake forecasting (OEF) for the estimation and the update of seismicity bas ed on continuous ground motion recording by seismic networks. OEF may provide results also in the short term, for example, in terms of weekly rate of events exceeding a certain magnitude threshold in each point of an area of interest. Therefore, it is worthwhile to investigate whether the OEF output may be employed for short-term risk management in regions affected by seismic swarms. The present paper reports about feasibility, in Italy, of passing from OEF to operational earthquake loss forecasting (OELF), that is to probabilistically convert results of OEF in consequence- based seismic risk metrics . To this aim probabilistic hypotheses and procedures to get near-real-time estimates of seismic risk are developed and discussed. The procedure set up relies on Italian vulnerability data in the form of damage probability matrices for structural categories, and Italian exposure data in terms of building s per vulnerability category and per municipality, and occupants per building typology. As an application, estimation of seismic risk is provided for the recent Pollino (southern Italy) seismic sequence. For this case, loss (risk) is defined in terms of weekly expected number: of fatalities, injuries, and shelter-seeking people, in the area of the seismic swarm. This preliminary study, without discussing OEF and vulnerability/exposure models, shows how to combine them to get probabilistically-consistent short-term seismic risk assessment in Italy.