Meetings February-March 2011

A series of Meetings on Testing & Evaluation, Macroseismic Intensity, Financial Modelling and OpenQuake Review have been held from 28 February - 2 March. The meetings were kindly hosted by Willis, and took place in the Willis Building in London. 

For the programme and to download the presentations that were held during the various sessions, please see below. For brief summaries of the meeting, you can download the following PDFs:

• Summary Testing & Evaluation Meeting
• Summary OpenQuake Review
• Summary Macroseismic Intensity Meeting
• Summary Financial Modelling Meeting

Andrew King (GNS), who has been heavily involved in research and other activities in Christchurch from September, gave an impressive presentation about the situation in the NZ city heavily impacted, especially by the February 2011 aftershock. Download his presentation.

Testing & Evaluation Meeting

Session 1: Introduction to Testing & Evaluation

• Introduction (Danijel Schorlemmer)
• OpenGEM and OpenQuake (Marco Pagani and Helen Crowley)
• Testing Targets (David Jackson)

Session 2: Testing the GEM hazard model – seismicity rate (Reporter: David Jackson)

• Results of the Regional Earthquake Likelihood Models (RELM) forecast experiment California (Jeremy Zechar)
• Testing earthquake forecast models in Europe (Stefan Wiemer)

Session 3: Testing the GEM hazard model - seismicity rate and ground motion (Reporter: Marco Pagani)

• Validation of ground motion simulations - presentation 1 and presentation 2 (Paul Somerville)
• Potential uses of macroseismic intensity data for hazard and risk model evaluation (David Wald)

Session 4: Testing the GEM risk model (Reporter: Helen Crowley)

• Loss calibration for earthquake risk models (Anselm Smolka and Alexander Allmann)
• Risk-related issues that would need to be considered and addressed in any end-to-end testing and evaluation programme (Andrew King)
• Testing the GEM Risk Components: Prospects and Problems (Robin Spence)
• Investigative Study of the 1978 Tabas Earthquake (Vitor Silva)

Session 5: Discussion and development of a draft testing plan

• Report on the discussions from Session 2 (David Jackson)
• Report on the discussions from Session 3 (Marco Pagani)
• Report on the discussions from Session 4 (Helen Crowley)
• Draft testing plan (Danijel Schorlemmer)

OpenQuake Development Review Meeting

Introduction

• Brief Introduction to OpenQuake (Marco Pagani and Helen Crowley)

OpenQuake Hazard and Risk Capabilities

• OpenQuake Hazard: main features and calculation examples (Damiano Monelli)
• OpenQuake Risk: main features and calculation examples (Vitor Silva)

OpenQuake Development

• OpenQuake Hazard Blueprints (Marco Pagani)
• OpenQuake Risk Blueprints (Helen Crowley)
• OpenQuake SEI Blueprints (Leonardo Garrido)

Macroseismic Intensity Meeting

Please note that there are no slides for the last 3 sessions; as these were discussions that led to the decisions summarised in the summary document (see above).

Introduction

• OpenQuake: current intensity-based calculation capabilities (Damiano Monelli and Vitor Silva)

Use and Need for Macroseismic Intensity in GEM

• Some considerations on macroseismic intensity in the context of GEM (Ezio Faccioli)
• Use of macroseismic intensity for risk assessment (Mustafa Erdik)

Macroseismic Intensity Prediction and Conversion Equations

• Some notes on the use of macroseismic intensity prediction and conversion equations (David Wald)
• Proposed GMPE for instrumental measures of MMI and verifications (Ken Campbell)
• Macroseismic and mechanical based vulnerability models: a way to establish correlation between macroseismic intensity and ground motion parameters (Sergio Lagomarsino)

Further Discussion of Macroseismic Intensity Issues

• Need/prospects for internationally agreed instrumental intensity scale (Robin Spence)
• Comparison standards for intensity measures in different regions (Ezio Faccioli)

Existing Projects and Databases

• Leveraging existing projects/activities (including Global Earthquake History consortium)
• Global macroseismic databases

Strategy for Macroseismic Intensity Related Activities in GEM

Financial Modelling Meeting

State-of-the-art methods

• Review of existing methods and risk management approaches regarding catastrophic risks in Public and Private sector (Leonardo Garrido)
• Financial modelling for public sector and comparison between deductive vs inductive approaches (Patrick McSharry)

Approaches undertaken by the Private Sector (Reporter: Leonardo Garrido)

• Willis Analytics
• Zurich
• Hannover Re
• Roundtable discussion:

1. Modelling approaches undertaken by insurers, reinsurers, brokers and analysts in the financial market, and description of financial instruments employed
2. Identification of modelling gaps (areas where there is room for improvement in financial modelling).

Possible areas of interest:

• Limitations imposed by data availability
• Linking hazard, risk and socio-economic variables
• Estimating “direct” and “indirect” losses
• Feedback, interdependency of risk and socio-economic attributes
• Forecasting and dynamic estimation of losses
• Methodological approaches

Organizing financial modelling under OpenQuake (Reporter: Leonardo Garrido)
Roundtable discussion:

• Identifying deliverables and defining a work strategy
• Identifying resources needed, including collaboration and contributions from Private Sponsors (based on strengths and experience)
• Prioritisation and scheduling (including June targets)

Stochastic CBA of retrofitting structures, insurance pooling mechanisms and transfer and retention of structures for governments and insurance / re-insurance (Reporter: Leonardo Garrido)

• Probabilistic cost-benefit analysis of retrofitting specific structures (hospitals, schools, etc.). Experience from CAPRA. (Jairo Varcarcel)
• Insurance pooling for low income households (Mabel Marulanda)
• Methods for transfer and retention structures for governments and insurance/reinsurance (Gabriel Bernal)

For some photos of the meeting, follow this link.