Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 20, 3577–3592, 2020 https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-20-3577-2020 © Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Style of faulting of expected earthquakes in Italy as an input for seismic hazard modeling Silvia Pondrelli1, Francesco Visini2, Andrea Rovida3, Vera D’Amico2, Bruno Pace4, and Carlo Meletti2 1Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Sezione di Bologna, Bologna, Italy 2Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Sezione di Pisa, Pisa, Italy 3Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Sezione di Milano, Milan, Italy 4DiSPUTer Department, Università G. d’Annunzio Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy Correspondence: Silvia Pondrelli (
[email protected]) Received: 4 March 2020 – Discussion started: 30 March 2020 Revised: 31 July 2020 – Accepted: 13 November 2020 – Published: 18 December 2020 Abstract. The style of faulting and distributions of nodal 1 Introduction planes are essential input for probabilistic seismic hazard as- sessment. As part of a recent elaboration of a new seismic The determination of the style of faulting in seismicity mod- hazard model for Italy, we defined criteria to parameterize els for probabilistic seismic hazard assessment (PSHA) rep- the styles of faulting of expected earthquake ruptures and to resents the key ingredient to define the orientation and the evaluate their representativeness in an area-based seismicity kinematics of the seismic source. The orientation (strike and model. Using available seismic moment tensors for relevant dip) of the seismic source impacts the source-to-site dis- seismic events (Mw ≥ 4:5), first arrival focal mechanisms for tance, an input for ground motion prediction equations (GM- less recent earthquakes, and also geological data on past acti- PEs), whereas the kinematics (i.e., rake) that take into ac- vated faults, we collected a database for the last ∼ 100 years count the style of faulting affect the choice of coefficients in by gathering a thousand data points for the Italian peninsula GMPEs.