3rd Croatian Conference on Earthquake Engineering 3CroCEE

The official adoption of Eurocode standards in North Macedonia, compared to developed EU countries, was only in recent years, leaving a significant gap that needs to be tackled. The new generation of Eurocode standards is posing demands to seismic hazard assessment’s outputs to use the most updated seismic hazard models, which will be crucial for the development of national annexes. To improve and refine the national seismic hazard model, it is essential to update and curate the existing datasets (i.e., earthquake catalogues, tectonics information and active faults), particularly in a country that has shown significant tectonic activity in the past decades with the occurrence of moderate to strong earthquakes. In just the last century, 12 earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 6.0 have occurred within the territory of North Macedonia, confirming the constant threat of earthquake to society.
The main task in developing a refined national seismogenic source model is to improve and update the national database by increasing the quality and thoroughness of all available national and regional seismotectonic databases. This activity involves compilation and statistical analyses of the updated national earthquake catalogue that chronologically ranges from 1000 to 2020. In its compiling, priority was given to the national catalogue from the National Seismological Observatory at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (SORM), which was then supplemented by events from the International Seismological Centre (ISC). Additionally, an overview of the latest defined active faults in North Macedonia will be presented, serving as an input for the new national seismic hazard model.
With recently collected and compiled data, along with updated information on seismically active faults in the region, we are now capable of elevating and upgrading the probabilistic seismic hazard assessment of the country, which previously was built primarily upon seismological data, i.e., data from past earthquakes.