An Artificial Seismic Catalogue for Methodological Research

An artificial earthquake catalog has been built up with the characteristics suggested by an Italian seismic zone as far as Intensity and space-time distributions are concerned, assuming a Poissonian occurrence model. The artificial catalogue does not pretend t o "simulate" the inspiring zone. It is simply a "plausible" catalog (under the Poissanian hypothesis) useful for the analysis of a few of the uncertainties in local hazard evaluation; mainly the uncertainties due to the hypotheses that are generally introduced about space distribution of earthquakes and those due to the limited amount of available data. The characteristics of the artificial catalogue (15,000 events with epicentral Intensity greater than 6 (in the Mercalli-Cancani-Sieberg scale) are described in the paper, and the results of a few local hazard evaluation "experiments" are presented.