EMSC Projects

RISE (Real-time earthquake rIsk reduction for a reSilient Europe) is a three-year project financed by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Commission.

Earthquakes are the deadliest natural hazard. Developing tools and measures to reduce future human and economic losses is the aim of this project coordinated by ETH Zurich and carried out by 19 organisations from across Europe and five international partners.

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TURNkey (Towards more Earthquake-resilient Urban Societies through a Multi-sensor-based Information System enabling Earthquake Forecasting, Early Warning and Rapid Response actions).

Among all natural hazards, earthquakes lead to the highest number fatalities and, after severe storms, cause the second highest annual economic losses. TURNkey is a project funded by the EU within the H2020 – SC5 – 2018 – 2 call (action RIA – Research Innovation Action). It addresses the topics of Operational Earthquake Forecasting (OEF), as well as of Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) and its use, both in real-time (during an event) and in near real-time, when rapidly responding to earthquake impacts

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ARISTOTLE (All Risk Integrated System TOwards Trans-boundary hoListic Early-warning) will deliver world leading multi-hazard capability to the Emergency Response Coordination Centre (ERCC).

ARISTOTLE has been designed to offer a flexible and scalable system that can provide new hazard-related services to the ERCC and to create a pool of experts in the field of Meteorology and Geophysics of Europe that can support the ERCC with regard to situation assessments in crisis situations. The new services system is set up in a way that it builds up on and adds value to existing information systems and sources, and that it fully respects national and regional responsibilities

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CARISMAND aims to deal with the issues of preparedness, response to disasters and after-crisis recovery which is inevitably influenced by cultural background of individuals and the society they live in.

In this context culture is understood as the characteristics of a particular group of people defined by everything from a set of values, history, literature, language, religion to cuisine, social habits or music and arts. Cultural factors play an important role in determining the way people response to stress, engage in crisis management and accept disaster relief in an emergency. However, these factors could also negatively impact the professional response to disaster because of the lack of cultural understanding, sensitivity and competencies as well as due to lack of understanding of the cultural background of the victims of a disaster. The project addresses risks as non-objective but socially and culturally constructed.

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IMPROVER is aimed at developing European Resilience Management Guideline and demonstrating it through pilot implementation.

The overall objective of IMPROVER is to improve European critical infrastructure resilience to crises and disasters through the implementation of resilience concepts to real life examples of pan-European significance, including cross-border examples.

The improvement will arise through the development of a methodology for implementing combinations of societal, organisational and technological resilience concepts to critical infrastructure based on risk evaluation techniques and informed by a review of the positive impact of different resilience concepts on critical infrastructure.

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Access to the Seismic Event, BroadBand and Strong Motion Data of the European Seismologic Station.

Thanks to a unique joint initiative by observatories, research institutes in and around Europe a broad set of seismological data is becoming available. Within NERIES, the seismic portal has been developed as a single point of access to diverse, distributed European datasets, and is now, after an experimental phase, available for general use at www.seismicportal.eu
The portal provides tools to explore and download earthquake information, broadband and accelerometric waveforms, as well as providing access to other NERIES project datasets as they become available. We would like to encourage you to try this out. We welcome your feedback and help us improve this service.

Please note that to use all the portal features, you must register and log in.

- The NERIES Portal Development Team

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Quake Catcher Network

The EMSC has deployed a QCN server for the Euro-Med region to initiate, promote and coordinate QCN deployments in the region. Our strategy is to perform dense deployments in urban-seismically active areas. There are currently several deployments in Greece (in Patras and in Thessaloniki) and in Martinique Islands (French Lesser Antilles).

In the framework of a European Project named ENVRIplus, the EMSC is calling for new participants. Volunteers will not only contribute data, but will help to better understand the earthquake phenomenon. Finally, by better understanding the earthquakes and their effects, participants will improve their earthquake preparedness.

EMSC calls for volunteers. Please join the project!

Citizens and scientists sharing knowledge: towards a new collaboration

Citizens have a major role to play in the collection of scientific data. As the first witnesses of seismic events, they hold a significant scientific knowledge too often overlooked. By involving citizens and using them as a primary source of information, scientists can study the population reaction to seismic events (sociology of risk and risk management), and obtain valuable testimonies on the seismic events themselves. Involving citizens for a better understanding of seismic events and a more efficient protection of societies is what Citizen Seismology is about.
Citizen Science has been acknowledged for many years, but the development of Citizen Seismology itself is very recent. With its many projects involving citizen participation, the EMSC is a driving force in this new area of study. Several educational materials are available such as posters, videos and articles for general public and school students.

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Version française du site : Sismologie citoyenne

SIGMA, for SeIsmic Ground Motion Assessment is a Research and Development programme initiated by EDF

The objective of the programme is to improve knowledge on the data, the methods, and the seismic hazard assessments, in order to better quantify the uncertainties. The EMSC contribution to the SIGMA project concerns the creation of the RESORCE database, that aims at being a reference seismic ground motion database in Europe for the development and the test of European ground motion prediction models to be used for seismic hazard studies.

This programme is spread into 5 development axis:

• A better knowledge of seismic sources
• A better knowledge of seismic motion – attenuation
• A better attention to site effects
• An improvement of seismic hazards models
• A better motion characterisation and exploitation of seismic motions

Access to the RESORCE database here (weblink to be added)

Virtual Earthquake and seismology Research in Europe Community e-science environment

Earthquake and seismology research addresses fundamental problems in understanding the Earth's internal wave sources and properties, thereby aiding society in the management of natural hazards, energy resources, environmental changes, and national security.

VERCE is supporting this effort by developing a data-intensive e-science environment to enable innovative data analysis and data modelling methods that fully exploit the increasing wealth of open data generated by the observational and monitoring systems of the global seismology community.

VERCE's strategy is to build upon a service-oriented architecture and a data-intensive platform delivering services, workflow tools, and software as a service, and to integrate the distributed European public data and computing infrastructures (GRID, HPC and CLOUD) with private resources and the European integrated data archives of the seismology community.

VERCE is a major contribution to the e-science environment of the European Plate Observing System (EPOS), the ESFRI initiative of the solid Earth community.
Please visit VERCE website to learn more about the project on www.verce.eu
View / Download / Print VERCE in a nutshell here

New Directions in Seismic Hazard Assessment through Focused Earth Observation in the Marmara Supersite

The recent devastating earthquakes and associated tsunamis in Japan, Indonesia, and Haiti, which killed more than half a million people, highlighted how mankind is still far away from a satisfactory level of seismic risk mitigation. Among the regions around the Mediterranean Sea for which earthquakes represent a major threat to their social and economic development, the area around the Marmara Sea, one of the most densely populated parts of Europe, is subjected to a high level of seismic hazard.

For this region the MARSITE project is proposed with the aim of assessing the “state of the art” of seismic risk evaluation and management at European level. This will be the starting point to move a “step forward” towards new concepts of risk mitigation and management by long-term monitoring activities carried out both on land and at sea.

The MARSITE project aims to coordinate research groups with different scientific skills (from seismology to engineering to gas geochemistry) in a comprehensive monitoring activity developed both in the Marmara Sea and in the surrounding urban and country areas. The project plans to coordinate initiatives to collect multidisciplinary data, to be shared, interpreted and merged in consistent theoretical and practical models suitable for the implementation of good practices to move the necessary information to the end users.

Network of European Research Infrastructures for Earthquake Risk Assessment and Mitigation

NERA (Network of European Research Infrastructures for Earthquake Risk Assessment and Mitigation) is an EC infrastructure project that integrates key research infrastructures in Europe for monitoring earthquakes and assessing their hazard and risk.

NERA integrates and facilitates the use of these infrastructures and access to data for research, provides services and access to earthquake data and parameters, and hazard and risk products and tools.

NERA activities are coordinated with other relevant EC-projects and European initiatives, and contribute to the ESFRI EPOS infrastructure and the OECD GEMprogram.

The European Plate Observing System

The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) is the integrated solid Earth Sciences research infrastructure approved by the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and included in the ESFRI Roadmap in December 2008. EPOS is a long-term integration plan of national existing RIs.

The goal of EPOS is to promote and make possible innovative approaches for a better understanding of the physical processes controlling earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, unrest episodes and tsunamis as well as those driving tectonics and Earth surface dynamics. Integration of the existing national and trans-national RIs will increase access and use of the multidisciplinary data recorded by the solid Earth monitoring networks, acquired in laboratory experiments and/or produced by computational simulations. Establishment of EPOS will foster worldwide interoperability in Earth Sciences and provide services to a broad community of users.

Strategies and tools for Real Time EArthquake RisK ReducTion

The general objective of the Project is to improve the efficiency of real time earthquake risk mitigation methods and its capability of protecting structures, infrastructures and people.

REAKT (Strategies and tools for Real Time EArthquake RisK ReducTion) aims at establishing the best practice on how to use jointly all the information coming from earthquake forecast, early warning and real time vulnerability assessment. All this information needs to be combined in a fully probabilistic framework, including realistic uncertainties estimations, to be used for decision making in real time.