About The Series

The CIVICA Data Science Seminar series is a unique multi-disciplinary series focused on applications and methodologies of data science for the social, political, and economic world.

Session 8 Spring 2022 Details

The comparison of different earthquakes is a popular tool to highlight particular aspects of one or several events. The objective is usually to demonstrate differences in the social conditions and how those affect the outcome of earthquake impacts. While earthquake magnitude is always presented in such comparisons, earthquake shaking is often not considered, even though shaking is the crucial determinant for impacts. Whenever differences in shaking are discussed, these discussions usually provide technical details that describe why the shaking was different and neglect to present how the shaking was different.

In this session of the CIVICA Data Science Seminar Series, Prof. Stephanie Lackner, IE University will demonstrate an approach that utilizes two separate but complimentary steps of data visualizations which can facilitate an effective communication of earthquake shaking and population exposure data to non-experts. The first step is a geospatial comparison of shaking maps at the same spatial and color scale. The second step simplifies the interpretation of the shaking profiles by removing the spatial component and plotting shaking and population "exposure curves". In some cases the exposure curves allow for a clear ranking of events in terms of shaking strength or population exposure. The suggested approach can be applied to any ground motion parameter. It is here demonstrated by comparing peak ground acceleration (PGA) data from notable earthquakes of the year 2010 in Haiti, Chile, and New Zealand. To facilitate the use of these methods, this work will be published with an R-package implementing the data visualizations.

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