PAGER-CAT: A Composite Earthquake Catalog for Calibrating Global Fatality Models

The compilation of a comprehensive global earthquake catalog that delivers both accurate source parameters and fatality estimates is a task that is simple in theory but challenging in practice. The necessary information is spread throughout numerous earthquake catalogs, reports, and online databases. Earthquake catalogs are created for different purposes, and consequently they excel in different areas. Some catalogs provide high-quality hypocenters while others contain carefully researched damage reports. Herein we examine published global catalogs and create PAGER-CAT, a composite global catalog of earthquake source parameters and effects. PAGER-CAT incorporates eight global earthquake catalogs and additional auxiliary data to provide comprehensive information not only for hypocentral locations, magnitudes, and human fatalities, but when available, focal mechanisms, the country of origin or the distance to the nearest landmass, local time and day of week, presence of secondary effects ( e.g. , tsunami, landslide, fire, or liquefaction) and deaths caused by these effects, the number of buildings damaged or destroyed, and the number of people injured or left homeless. The first version of the catalog is composed of more than 140 fields in which detailed event information can be recorded and currently includes events from 1900 through December 2007, with emphasis on earthquakes since 1973. The catalog was compiled for calibration and development of earthquake fatality models to be used by the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response (PAGER) system. The PAGER system currently provides estimates of the number of people and the names of cities exposed to severe shaking following significant earthquakes (Earle et al. 2008; Wald et al. 2008). In the future, PAGER will produce rapid fatality estimates within approximately 20 minutes of an earthquake's occurrence anywhere on the globe, using loss models calibrated against PAGER-CAT ( e.g. , Jaiswal et al. 2008; Porter et al. …