New treatment of intensities of pre-instrumental earthquakes for hazard purposes

We developed an original semi-empirical kinematic model for shear body waves, KF (Sirovich, 1996, 1997). In the inverse mode, KF can be applied for the geophysical inversion of the intensities of pre-instrumental destructive earthquakes, to retrieve their principal source characteristics. This is relevant in countries where earthquakes have long recurrence times. KF can be used also parametrically, in the direct way, for calculating regional scenarios of intensity (Sirovich and Pettenati, 2004a, 2008a, 2009; Pettenati and Sirovich, 2006; Pettenati et al., 2008) and of maximum particle displacements (Sirovich and Pettenati, 2007). Both techniques were validated by treating earthquakes, well known independently from our studies. Then, we use an evolution of our natural-neighbor n-n bivariate interpolation scheme for contouring all kinds of data (Sirovich et al., 2002). Note that n-n needs no contouring parametres and does not act as a filter; thus, with the same data, everybody obtains the same contour.