A Spatial Correlation Analysis of Seismic and Flooding Events - Application to Italy.

Among destroying events, earthquakes and floods have kept a major concern in the studies regarding prevention and planning rescue activities in order to possibly reduce victims and damages. Although the research in this field have already reached important results, there is a lot of possible improvement in the analysis and techniques for minimizing their effects. This paper reports a spatial analysis, through image processing, regarding the correlation of flooding events and earthquakes as complementary activities in Italy. In fact, the related areas generally do not overlap in all the country, so that the main result of this work is that the major risks for strong seismic activities are in certain areas, which are different to those with a major risk of flooding. This result may therefore improve the optimization of possible investments for limiting, or even preventing, the effects of such events after considering their probability of happening in a certain local area.