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Probabilistic earthquake hazard analysis for Cairo, Egypt

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Abstract

Cairo is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the sixteenth largest metropolitan area in the world. It was founded in the tenth century (969 ad) and is 1046 years old. It has long been a center of the region’s political and cultural life. Therefore, the earthquake risk assessment for Cairo has a great importance. The present work aims to analysis the earthquake hazard of Cairo as a key input’s element for the risk assessment. The regional seismotectonics setting shows that Cairo could be affected by both far- and near-field seismic sources. The seismic hazard of Cairo has been estimated using the probabilistic seismic hazard approach. The logic tree frame work was used during the calculations. Epistemic uncertainties were considered into account by using alternative seismotectonics models and alternative ground motion prediction equations. Seismic hazard values have been estimated within a grid of 0.1° × 0.1 ° spacing for all of Cairo’s districts at different spectral periods and four return periods (224, 615, 1230, and 4745 years). Moreover, the uniform hazard spectra have been calculated at the same return periods. The pattern of the contour maps show that the highest values of the peak ground acceleration is concentrated in the eastern zone’s districts (e.g., El Nozha) and the lowest values at the northern and western zone’s districts (e.g., El Sharabiya and El Khalifa).

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the Associate Editor, Prof. Andrzej Kijko, and the three anonymous reviewers for their critical reviews which have greatly helped to improve the paper. This work has been carried out at Earthquake Division of the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics (NRIAG). The authors are also grateful to the all staff members of the ENSN. Great thanks to Prof. D. Kossy at Imperial College, London, for reviewing the revised version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Ahmed Badawy.

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Badawy, A., Korrat, I., El-Hadidy, M. et al. Probabilistic earthquake hazard analysis for Cairo, Egypt. J Seismol 20, 449–461 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10950-015-9537-5

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