Probabilistic Estimates of Ground Motion in the Los Angeles Basin from Scenario Earthquakes on the San Andreas Fault
by
Ramses Mourhatch †
and
Swaminathan Krishnan *,‡
Ramses Mourhatch † and
Swaminathan Krishnan *,‡
Mechanical and Civil Engineering Department, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
†
Current address: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA
‡
Current address: Arup, Los Angeles, CA 90066, USA
Geosciences 2018, 8(4), 126; https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences8040126
Received: 28 December 2017 / Revised: 4 March 2018 / Accepted: 28 March 2018 / Published: 6 April 2018
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Site-Specific Seismic Hazard Analysis: New Perspectives, Open Issues and Challenges)
Kinematic source inversions of past earthquakes in the magnitude range of 6–8 are used to simulate 60 scenario earthquakes on the San Andreas fault. The unilateral rupture scenario earthquakes are hypothetically located at 6 locations spread out uniformly along the southern section of the fault, each associated with two hypocenters and rupture directions. Probabilities of occurrence over the next 30 years are assigned to each of these earthquakes by mapping the probabilities of 10,445 plausible earthquakes postulated for this section of the fault by the Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast. Three-component broadband ground motion histories are computed at 636 sites in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area by superposing short-period (0.2–2.0 s) empirical Green’s function synthetics on top of long-period (>2.0 s) spectral element synthetics. The earthquake probabilities and the computed ground motions are combined to develop probabilistic estimates of ground shaking in the region from San Andreas fault earthquakes over the next 30 years. The results could be useful in city planning, emergency management, and building code enhancement.
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Keywords:
Probabilistic seismic hazard; broadband ground motion simulation; earthquake probabilites; San Andreas fault; Los Angeles basin; Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast (UCERF); ground shaking intensities
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MDPI and ACS Style
Mourhatch, R.; Krishnan, S. Probabilistic Estimates of Ground Motion in the Los Angeles Basin from Scenario Earthquakes on the San Andreas Fault. Geosciences 2018, 8, 126.
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