Building Codes for an Earthquake Resistant Design

In order to evaluate the effects of earthquakes on society, our section is cooperating closely with earthquake engineers. In this way, our results obtain direct, practical relevance and provide guidelines for the decision makers.

An example of such work is the European Macroseismic Scale (EMS-98). With the EMS-98, a macroseismic scale for intensity evaluation was developed, under our leadership, which is significantly more objective than earlier scales. Additionally, the scale provides the possibility of transferring our or others’ hazard evaluations into seismic risk assessments.

One of our seismic hazard maps for the D-A-CH countries (Germany D, Austria A and Switzerland CH) was used as basis for the map of earthquake zones in the national implementation document of the EUROCODE 8. This map is furthermore used for the latest version of the German earthquake construction code DIN 4149 (version 2005) and is supplemented by a map of geological subsoil classes in the earthquake zones. Based on these maps, a query can be made for the allocation of localities to earthquake zones of the DIN 4149 (version 2005), based on the coordinates of the localities of interest.