Verification of the European Seismic Risk Model (ESRM20)

A European seismic risk model will be released in 2020 as an output of the European Horizon 2020 SERA project (www.sera-eu.org), building also upon the research efforts of many previous projects (e.g. LESSLOSS, SYNER-G, NERA, SHARE). The main risk metrics that will be released with the model include national and sub-national maps of average annual loss (AAL) and probable maximum loss (PML) and national loss exceedance curves for 46 countries in Europe. Before the release of this model, the performance of its components needs to be extensively evaluated through a number of different tests. This paper provides a brief summary of the current development of the ESRM20 and describes the testing framework that is being set up for the testing of the model. This framework leverages software development and includes unit tests, integration tests, system tests and acceptance tests. Unit tests consider the components of the risk model separately, whereas integration tests check the performance of a group of components together. Example integration tests include history checks where the total losses (fatalities and economic losses) estimated from all events in the European earthquake catalogue since 1980 will be undertaken, and comparisons will be made with the total observed losses and empirically derived annual average losses and loss exceedance curves (with the losses adjusted to today’s value). To constrain the ground motion in the previous test, ShakeMaps for the historical events over the aforementioned period are being used to predict the damage/losses/consequences using the ‘Scenario from ShakeMap’ calculator of the OpenQuake-engine and these are being compared with the reported numbers in loss databases. More detailed verification tests are also being made for events in Italy and Greece for which detailed damage data at the building-by-building level is available. Once the ERSM20 model is released, its components could then be submitted for prospective testing in a new testing centre that is being set up as part of the Horizon 2020 RISE project.The research described herein has received national funding from the 'JRU EPOS Italia' project as well as European funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements No 730900 (Seismology and Earthquake Engineering Research Infrastructure Alliance for Europe 'SERA' project) and No 821115 (Real-time Earthquake Risk Reduction for a Resilient Europe 'RISE' project)