Seismic Hazard Assessment and Determination of Maximum Design Base Acceleration of Yazd

According to Iranian code of practice for seismic resistant design of buildings standard No. 2800, Yazd is located in the place with the medium earthquake hazard [1]. Due to the position of Yazd with many historical and important buildings, maintaining these traditional heritages is an important task in civil engineering field. On account of these mentioned valuable buildings and region potential in constructing the new vital structures, exact regional seismicity surveying and seismic hazard assessment would need to be scrutinized. For this purpose a collected catalogue, containing both historical and instrumental events is used covering the period from the 4th century BC to 2010. Seismic sources are modeled and recurrence relationship is obtained. The method proposed by Kijko [2] and Tavakoli [3] were employed for determination of seismicity parameters. Then logic tree method and weighted attenuation relationships were applied. Probabilistic seismic hazard assessment is carried out using SEISRISK III for Yazd University site. At the end, Peak Ground Accelerations (PGA) of the studied area for a return period of 475 and 2475 years for 10% and 2% probability of exceedance in life cycle of 50 years are evaluated equal to 0.25g and 0.35g.