A dataset of hydrological effects induced by historical and modern earthquakes in the Southern Apennines of Italy

We present a dataset of 610 observations of hydrological changes associated with 40 seismic events that occurred in Southern Italy between 1688 and 2019 with magnitude ranging between M=4.1 and M=7.1. We report variations in the discharge of rivers and springs, the level of the water in wells, effects of liquefaction, turbid flow, and variations of the chemical-physical parameters of waters. The data was collected between 2020 and 2024 as one of the outcomes of the Project ‘Further - The role of fluids in the preparatory phase of earthquakes in Southern Apennines’, which aims at investigating the whole pathway of fluids from the source to the surface in peninsular Southern Italy.

Methods
Data was collected in archives and libraries, genre literature, newspapers, seismic postacards, macroseismic questionnaires, specific online databases, scientific papers. The hydrological data were filed by earthquake into individual folders composed of 1) a sub-folder with the original sources of information, 2) a text file with notes and transcriptions of the original observations, along with references and bibliography, and 3) a Google spreadsheets file with the database of hydrological observations. Following a final round of screening and editing of the collected data, we merged each single Google spreadsheet (relative to the individual earthquakes) in a unique Microsoft Excel spreadsheets file (XLS).