Newsletter XVIII - New European Seismic Risk Service released by the European Facilities for Earthquake Hazard and Risk (EFEHR)
By Helen Crowley
Earlier this year, a new web platform - the European Seismic Risk Service - was released as part of the European Facilities for Earthquake Hazard and Risk (EFEHR). The EFEHR Consortium is a non-profit network of organisations and community resources aimed at advancing earthquake hazard and risk assessment in the European-Mediterranean area.
The hazard service of EFEHR currently provides access to a number of outputs from the 2013 European Seismic Hazard Model or ESHM13 (available on-line from www.efehr.org/en/hazard-data-access/). The new risk service of EFEHR has been set up with the main objective of providing interactive access to seismic risk products, including:
- European exposure data and models for residential, commercial and industrial buildings and their occupants.
- European fragility, consequence and vulnerability models.
- Indicators and composite indices of European social vulnerability, resilience and recovery.
- European seismic risk results in terms of average annual loss (AAL), probable maximum loss (PML), and risk maps in terms of economic loss and fatalities for specific return periods and indicators of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.
- Methods and data to test and evaluate the components of seismic risk models.
- Access to and support for OpenQuake Engine, the free, open-source software (developed by the GEM Foundation) for the assessment of earthquake hazard and computation of seismic risk.
- Documentation on all of the datasets and models.
- Scientific support on the development of the models and seismic risk computations.
Currently users of the new European Seismic Risk Service can access various layers and web services for European exposure data (see Figure below), as well as a number of reports and deliverables documenting the development of the exposure, vulnerability, and site amplification models.
The first model of European seismic risk under the EFEHR umbrella – the European Seismic Risk Model 2020 or ESRM20 (Crowley et al., 2019) - is currently being developed within the EU Horizon 2020 project SERA (Seismology and Earthquake Engineering Research Infrastructure Alliance for Europe; www.sera-eu.org), and will be released in April 2020. Following the release of ESRM2020, all input models and results will be provided through the European seismic risk service web-site.