Abstract
It is common practice to use ground-motion models, often developed by regression on recorded accelerograms, to predict the expected earthquake ground motions at sites of interest. An important consideration when selecting these models is the possible dependence of ground motions on geographical region, i.e., are median ground motions in the (target) region of interest for a given magnitude and distance the same as those in the (host) region where a ground-motion model is from, and are the aleatory variabilities of ground motions also similar? In this brief article, some of the recent literature with relevance to these questions is summarized. It is concluded that although some regions seem to show considerable differences in shaking it is currently more defensible to use well-constrained models, possibly based on data from other regions, rather than use local, often poorly-constrained, models. In addition, it is noted that the presence of “pseudo-regional dependency ” due to differences in, for example, focal depth s, average shear-wave velocity profiles or focal mechanisms can lead to apparent variations between areas when these variations could be captured in well-characterized ground-motion prediction equation s.
John Douglas is also at BRGM, Orléans, France.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Landsvirkjun and the University of Iceland for funding my 1-year visiting professorship at the Earthquake Engineering Research Centre, University of Iceland. Also I thank the organizers of the Second Euro-Med iterranean meeting on Accelerometric Data Exchange and Archiving for the invitation to present at this meeting. This article has benefited from participation in discussions during the PEGASOS Refinement Project and the EC-funded Seventh Framework Programme project SHARE and with Teraphan Ornthammarth.
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Douglas, J. (2011). Investigating Possible Regional Dependence in Strong Ground Motions. In: Akkar, S., Gülkan, P., van Eck, T. (eds) Earthquake Data in Engineering Seismology. Geotechnical, Geological, and Earthquake Engineering, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0152-6_3
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