Selection of real accelerograms for the seismic response analysis of the historical town of Nicastro (Southern Italy) during the March 1638 Calabria earthquake

Real accelerograms are nowadays an emerging option for defining the input to geotechnical and structural dynamic analyses. A key issue is the selection of appropriate acceleration time-histories since seismic design code recommendations are limited in this respect and also well-established procedures are not available. In the paper a simple approach for selecting and scaling a set of real accelerograms was followed which took into consideration magnitude and distance search windows, record-to-record variability of spectral ordinates with respect to the target spectrum and the prevention of seismic event domination within a set. This procedure was applied to a real case, i.e. the selection of real accelerograms representative of the March 1638 Calabria earthquake that severely struck the historical town of Nicastro (Southern Italy). The selected time-histories represent an appropriate input for the numerical response analyses of the site to adequately evaluate the seismic hazard, which is a fundamental step of seismic risk evaluation.