Seismic risk assessment for developing countries : Pakistan as a case study

Modern Earthquake Risk Assessment (ERA) methods usually require seismo-tectonic information for Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Assessment (PSHA) that may not be readily available in developing countries. To bypass this drawback, this paper presents a practical event-based PSHA method that uses instrumental seismicity, available historical seismicity, as well as limited information on geology and tectonic setting. Historical seismicity is integrated with instrumental seismicity to determine the long-term hazard. The tectonic setting is included by assigning seismic source zones associated with known major faults. Monte Carlo simulations are used to generate earthquake catalogues with randomized key hazard parameters. A case study region in Pakistan is selected to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. The results indicate that the proposed method produces seismic hazard maps consistent with previous studies, thus being suitable for generating such maps in regions where limited data are available. The PSHA procedure is developed as an integral part of an ERA framework named EQRAM. The framework is also used to determine seismic risk in terms of annual losses for the study region

Site-specific uniform hazard spectrum in Eastern Turkey based on simulated ground motions including near-field directivity and detailed site effects

In this study, stochastic earthquake catalog of the Erzincan region in Turkey is generated based on synthetic ground motions. Monte Carlo simulation method is used to identify the spatial and temporal distribution of events. Ground motion time histories are generated using stochastic simulation methodology. Annual exceedance rate of each ground motion amplitude is calculated through statistical distribution of the complete set of ground motions. The results are compared with classical probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA). Classical PSHA generally produces larger spectral amplitudes than the proposed study due to wide range of aleatory variability. The effects of near-field forward directivity and detailed site response are also investigated on the results