The Friuli Venezia Giulia Accelerometric Network: RAF

The first stations of the Friuli Venezia Giulia (NE Italy) Accelerometric Network (Rete Accelerometrica del Friuli Venezia Giulia-RAF) were installed by the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Trieste, in the early nineties in the framework of international scientific projects. Today RAF is configured, taking in to account also other network stations operating in Italy as well as in Austria and Slovenia, to record accelerations at several important sites in the seismic area of Friuli Venezia Giulia and near its borders with Slovenia and Austria. This allows an immediate estimate of peak ground acceleration as well as a first evaluation of possible damages. In the year 2000, DST and the Friuli Venezia Giulia Direction of the Civil Defence signed an agreement for the RAF management and its use for civil defence purposes, like the prompt estimate of the damage level after an earthquake occurrence, the emergency management, the reconstruction planning, and the validation and updating of seismic hazard maps. Moreover, RAF recordings are used also for prevention purposes by the civil defence. This is performed with the computation of real time shake maps, possible ground-shaking scenarios, studies of the physics of the seismic source, site effects estimates and microzonation analyses.