On the development of a correlation model between ground motion parameters and EMS98 intensity observations

The relation between observed macroseismic intensities and recorded ground motion parameters is a matter of interest in earthquake engineering, and it has been widely discussed in literature in the past. Several relationships already exist, correlating macroseismic intensity and peak ground motion parameters (i.e. PGA, PGV or PGD, respectively peak ground acceleration, velocity and displacement). However, most of these formulations are based on Mercalli-Cancani-Sieberg (MCS) scale, developed using regional databases and difficult to be applied at large scale. In this work, a first attempt in developing a reliable correlation model between European Macroseismic Scale (EMS-98) with ground shaking parameters (PGMs) is illustrated. A PGM/EMS98-intensity dataset was assembled for this scope, collecting data from the DataBase of Macroseismic observations of Italy DBMI15 (Locati et al., 2016), and the Italian Accelerometric Archive ITACA (Luzi et al., 2017). The database includes 607 data pairs of observations from 35 different Italian seismic events. On this basis, a preliminary correlation model is set up via the use of the Orthogonal Distance Regression (ODR) technique.