Looking for undocumented earthquake effects: a probabilistic analysis of Italian macroseismic data

A methodology to detect local incompleteness of macroseismic intensity data at the local scale is presented. In particular, the probability that undocumented effects actually occurred at a site is determined by considering intensity prediction equations (in their probabilistic form) integrated by observations relative to known events documented at surrounding sites. The outcomes of this analysis can be used to investigate how representative and known the seismic histories of localities are (i.e., the list of documented effects through time). The proposed approach is applied to the Italian area. The analysis shows that, at most of the considered sites, the effects of intensity >= 6 should most probably have occurred at least once, but they are not contained in the current version of the Italian macroseismic databases. In a few cases, instead, the lack of data may concern higher intensity levels (i.e., >= 8). The geographical distribution of potentially lost information reflects the heterogeneity of the seismic activity over the Italian territory.