Italian Tsunami Effects Database (ITED): the first database of tsunami effects observed along the Italian coasts

Abstract. The Italian Tsunami Effects Database (ITED), consists of an ensemble of records reporting tsunami effects observed at several Observation Points (OP) along the Italian coasts from historical times. ITED was compiled starting from the Euro Mediterranean Tsunami Catalogue (EMTC) and it focuses on the propagation effects observed along the Italian coasts, providing information on how each locality was interested by tsunami effects over time. The effects reported in ITED are related to tsunamis occurred within the Italian territory and contained in the EMTC; these events were excerpt, analyzed and updated according to recent studies published in literature.

The database can be accessed through a web GIS application, that displays the location of the OPs indicating for each of them the description of tsunami effects found in literature and the corresponding bibliographic references as well as the metrics related to the observed event. Based on those descriptions, the estimate value of the tsunami intensity has been assigned to each OP, according to both the Sieberg-Ambraseys and the Papadopoulos-Imamura scales. All the ITED data, including quantitative data such as runup, inundation, withdrawal, can be retrieved by accessing online the database through the WebApp that was expressly designed and built for this purpose.

ITED contains 300 observations of tsunami effects at 225 OPs referred to 186 Italian main localities, hereafter called Place Name (PN) related to 72 Italian tsunamis. The database provides also the tsunami-history for each PN, allowing the end user to have a complete picture of how the PN is prone to tsunami effects.The realization of ITED was also the occasion to update Italian tsunamis contained in the EMTC, leading to the release of a new version of the EMTC catalogue, named EMTC2.0.

ITED was specifically built to meet the needs of the tsunami hazard community, thus providing useful information that can improve the knowledge on how much the national territory is exposed to tsunami risk.