The SHARE European Earthquake Catalogue (SHEEC) 1000–1899

In the frame of the European Commission
project “Seismic Hazard Harmonization in Europe”
(SHARE), aiming at harmonizing seismic hazard at a
European scale, the compilation of a homogeneous,
European parametric earthquake catalogue was planned.
The goal was to be achieved by considering the most
updated historical dataset and assessing homogenous
magnitudes, with support from several institutions. This
paper describes the SHARE European Earthquake
Catalogue (SHEEC), which covers the time window
1000–1899. It strongly relies on the experience of the
European Commission project “Network of Research
Infrastructures for European Seismology” (NERIES), a
module of which was dedicated to create the European
“Archive of Historical Earthquake Data” (AHEAD) and
to establish methodologies to homogenously derive earthquake
parameters from macroseismic data. AHEAD has
supplied the final earthquake list, obtained after sorting duplications out and eliminating many fake events; in
addition, it supplied the most updated historical dataset.
Macroseismic data points (MDPs) provided by AHEAD
have been processed with updated, repeatable procedures,
regionally calibrated against a set of recent, instrumental
earthquakes, to obtain earthquake parameters. From the
same data, a set of epicentral intensity-to-magnitude relations
has been derived,with the aimof providing another set
of homogeneous Mw estimates. Then, a strategy focussed
on maximizing the homogeneity of the final epicentral
location and Mw, has been adopted. Special care has been
devoted also to supply location and Mw uncertainty. The
paper focuses on the procedure adopted for the compilation
of SHEEC and briefly comments on the achieved results.