SHAKEMaps - effiziente Tools für die Reinterpretation und Prognose von Erdbebenschäden

SHAKEMaps - Efficient tools for the reinterpretation and prognosis of earthquake damage

The real-time availability of internet-based SHAKEMaps after an earthquake gains increasing importance for official decision-makers, operators of safety-relevant systems, and life lines (energy, water, food, transport, and communication) as well as planners. Not least to engage the public with a high level of information quality and transparency as well as to interact with internet platforms being offered to generate SHAKEMaps according to the implied procedures. Advances in the availability of geodata and the extended options of geo-information technologies enable the link between automatically generated SHAKEMaps with different levels of prognosis concerning the probable effects on buildings and infrastructure as well as a primary assessment of the socio-economic consequences.
SHAKEMaps refer to concepts of web-based intensity assignments and the use of recorded ground motions (in case of the existence of a refined seismic network) to correlate the instrumental data with the reported observations and to derive initial estimates of the consequences. As for German earthquake regions the required comprehensive seismic instrumentation is not available and damage-related registrations are missing, the experience of historical earthquakes and the macroseismic observations (in terms of intensities) could be still taken as primary input.The paper gives an overview of approaches to generate macroseismic shaking maps (SHAKEMaps) in-time. For the case study of German earthquake regions it will be shown how the SHAKEMaps can be elaborated on the basis of macroseismic observations and their systematic evaluation and how local or regional particularities of site amplification (anomalies) could be inserted. An evaluation of available information on the existing building stock, the construction types, and building categories provides the basis to describe the grade of "impact" in different fields of interest. The relevant tools are using databases and damage models which are related to the European Macroseismic Scale EMS-98 and the empirical intensity concept.