Updated Earthquake Catalogue for South America: Time Window Pre-1964

Abstract eng:
On the frame of the project SARA (The South America Risk Assessment), the goal of task 4 (T4 from now on) is to compile an earthquake catalogue for South America, in terms of Mw building on the CERESIS available data, recent national and international studies and analysis conducted during the project. In particular, they include the latest versions of catalogue CERESIS-91 prepared for the Pan American Institute of Geography and History (PAIGH), which was later employed by the same CERESIS in linking the Global Seismic Hazard Assessment Programme (GSHAP); the determination of parameters by recent studies, including those proposed by the ISCGEM catalogue, and where available, the national catalogues that meet the criteria of transparency required by the project. The activities describe here refer to the pre-1964 time window. The first phase of the study has been the development of a critical inventory of all public studies related to earthquakes of South America. Studies for the same event have been associated with each other from the comparison of the time, of the epicentre coordinates and the size of the earthquake. For each event, a set of parameters considered reliable has been preliminarily selected. The main problem of the catalogue is the need to express the values of magnitude in terms of Mw. Currently, few studies on earthquakes provide that value. For many events, values in terms of Ms and mb are available; although for most cases, because of the time of occurrence of these events, the magnitude values were calculated from macroseismic data. For these earthquakes we have used empirical conversion relationships published in literature (Mw / Ms and Mw / mb). There are also events for which a value of Imax or Io is available, only. For these events, Mw/Io regional relationships have been determined, using the most reliable and recent data terms of Mw and Io. In a second phase, for some events that have a sufficient number of macroseismic data, the source parameters have been determined using the method of Bakun and Wentworth, regionally calibrated, based on what already has been worked out in Ecuador, Venezuela in literature and Colombia in the present project.

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