LAUSR

ABSTRACT A low‐magnitude regional ground‐motion prediction equation (GMPE) for peak ground acceleration and 5% damped spectral acceleration at 11 oscillator periods ranging from 0.1 to 3 s was developed for applications of the earthquake early warning system operating in southern Italy. The accelerometric dataset was built out of 2270 waveforms from 319 earthquakes with local magnitude ranging from 1.5 to 4.2, recorded from 60 stations located on soil type B, according to the Italian Building Code and Eurocode 8, with hypocentral distances ranging from 3 to about 100 km. The GMPE coefficients were computed through a nonlinear weighted damped least‐squares algorithm, attributing a higher weight to ground‐motion data recorded at stations for which soil category was established using geotechnical and geophysical measurements. Predictions of the proposed GMPE were tested against independent ground‐motion data recorded in southern Italy and compared with other regional and global GMPEs through the log‐likelihood method. The comparison shows that the proposed GMPE performs better than any other GMPE considered in this study.