A Test of Strong Ground Motion "Prediction" for the 26 September 1997, Mw 6.0 Colfiorito Eaethquake (Italy).

We test a methodology to "predict" ground-motion hazard for a fixed magnitude earthquake along a specific fault or within a specific source volume. In our test, we develope constraints on rupture parameters of the 1997 Colfiorito (Italy) earthquake based on previous studies. Then we develope a suite of 100 rupture scenarios for this fault, and synthesize observed strong motion records for each scenario. We use the program HAZARD (Hutchings, 2002) to randomly select rupture parameters, and the program EMPSYN (Hutchings, 1991) to synthesize strong ground motion with empirical Green's functions. We demonstrate that 100 scenarios is sufficient to statistically span the range of possible ground motion hazard from this fault. We utilize a quantitative comparison between observed and synthesized records to examine the potential for this methodology to develop realistic synthetic strong ground motions for specific sites from specific earthquakes. In the same time we identify our best model of the 26 September 1997, M_w = 6.0 Colfiorito earthquake, and we interpret this model to better understand the source process.