Karim Tarbali

Ground motion simulations of great earthquakes on the Alpine Fault: effect of hypocentre location and comparison with empirical modelling

ABSTRACT This paper discusses simulated ground motion intensity, and its underlying modelling assumptions, for great earthquakes on the Alpine Fault. The simulations utilise the latest understanding of wave propagation physics, kinematic earthquake rupture descriptions and the three-dimensional nature of the Earths crust in the South Island of New Zealand. The effect of hypocentre location is explicitly examined, which is found to lead to significant differences in ground motion intensities (quantified in the form of peak ground velocity, PGV) over the northern half and southwest of the South Island. Comparison with previously adopted empirical ground motion models also illustrates that the simulations, which explicitly model rupture directivity and basin-generated surface waves, lead to notably larger PGV amplitudes than the empirical predictions in the northern half of the South Island and Canterbury. The simulations performed in this paper have been adopted, as one possible ground motion prediction, in the ‘Project AF8’ Civil Defence Emergency Management exercise scenario. The similarity of the modelled ground motion features with those observed in recent worldwide earthquakes as well as similar simulations in other regions, and the notably higher simulated amplitudes than those from empirical predictions, may warrant a re-examination of regional impact assessments for major Alpine Fault earthquakes.

Consideration and Propagation of Ground Motion Selection Epistemic Uncertainties to Seismic Performance Metrics

This paper investigates various approaches to propagate the effect of epistemic uncertainty in seismic hazard and ground motion selection to seismic performance metrics. Specifically, three approaches with different levels of rigor are presented for establishing the conditional distribution of intensity measures considered for ground motion selection, selecting ground motion ensembles, and performing nonlinear response history analyses (RHAs) to probabilistically characterize seismic response. The mean and distribution of the seismic demand hazard is used as the principal means to compare the various results. An example application illustrates that, for seismic demand levels significantly below the collapse limit, epistemic uncertainty in seismic response resulting from ground motion selection can generally be considered as small relative to the uncertainty in the seismic hazard itself. In contrast, uncertainty resulting from ground motion selection appreciably increases the uncertainty in the seismic demand hazard for near-collapse demand levels.