An earthquake-source-based metric for seismic fragility analysis

Seismic source modeling by clustering earthquakes and predicting earthquake magnitudes

Seismic sources are currently generated manually by experts, a process which is not efficient as the size of historical earthquake databases is growing. However, large historical earthquake databases provide an opportunity to generate seismic sources through data mining techniques. In this paper, we propose hierarchical clustering of historical earthquakes for generating seismic sources automat...

EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING PRACTICE Creating Fragility Functions for Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering

The Applied Technology Council is adapting PEER’s performance-based earthquake engineering methodology to professional practice. The methodology’s damage-analysis stage uses fragility functions to calculate the probability of damage to facility components given the force, deformation, or other engineering demand parameter (EDP) to which each is subjected. This paper introduces a set of procedur...

Seismic CAT-Scan of an Ancient Earthquake

Two-dimensional and three-dimensional seismic surveys were conducted across the Oquirrh fault, Utah with the purpose of imaging the fault structure to a depth of about 15 m. Results show that the 3-D tomogram clearly delineates the fault zone and a colluvial wedge, both of which correlate extremely well with the geologic cross-section interpreted from an adjacent trench. The thickness of the co...

Poisson model for earthquake frequency uncertainties in seismic hazard analysis

Frequency-magnitude distributions, and their associated uncertainties, are of key importance in statistical seismology. When fitting these distributions , the assumption of Gaussian residuals is invalid since event numbers are both discrete and of unequal variance. In general, the observed number in any given magnitude range is described by a binomial distribution which, given a large total num...

Computational Geodynamics for Seismic Hazard Analysis and Earthquake Prediction