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Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Assessment for Himalayan–Tibetan Region from Historical and Instrumental Earthquake Catalogs

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Abstract

The Himalayan–Tibetan region has a long history of devastating earthquakes with wide-spread casualties and socio-economic damages. Here, we conduct the probabilistic seismic hazard analysis by incorporating the incomplete historical earthquake records along with the instrumental earthquake catalogs for the Himalayan–Tibetan region. Historical earthquake records back to more than 1000 years ago and an updated, homogenized and declustered instrumental earthquake catalog since 1906 are utilized. The essential seismicity parameters, namely, the mean seismicity rate γ, the Gutenberg–Richter b value, and the maximum expected magnitude M max are estimated using the maximum likelihood algorithm assuming the incompleteness of the catalog. To compute the hazard value, three seismogenic source models (smoothed gridded, linear, and areal sources) and two sets of ground motion prediction equations are combined by means of a logic tree on accounting the epistemic uncertainties. The peak ground acceleration (PGA) and spectral acceleration (SA) at 0.2 and 1.0 s are predicted for 2 and 10% probabilities of exceedance over 50 years assuming bedrock condition. The resulting PGA and SA maps show a significant spatio-temporal variation in the hazard values. In general, hazard value is found to be much higher than the previous studies for regions, where great earthquakes have actually occurred. The use of the historical and instrumental earthquake catalogs in combination of multiple seismogenic source models provides better seismic hazard constraints for the Himalayan–Tibetan region.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the grant of the National Nature Science Foundation of China (No. 41490611) to L.B., and by the President’s PhD Fellowship of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) to M.M.R. We used earthquake catalogs from the ISC, USGS, GEM, CSN, NOAA, and NSC. We are grateful to the guest editor Zhigang Peng and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and thoroughly review on the manuscript. We thank Fabrice Cotton for the useful discussions. We are grateful to Andrzej Kijko and his colleagues for providing the “HA3” program and Mario Ordaz for providing the recently developed version of the CRISIS software.

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  1. Key Laboratory of Continental Collision and Plateau Uplift, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    M. Moklesur Rahman, Ling Bai, Nangyal Ghani Khan & Guohui Li

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    M. Moklesur Rahman

  3. Department of Petroleum and Mining Engineering, University of Jessore Science and Technology, Jessore, 7408, Bangladesh

    M. Moklesur Rahman

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  1. M. Moklesur Rahman
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Rahman, M.M., Bai, L., Khan, N.G. et al. Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Assessment for Himalayan–Tibetan Region from Historical and Instrumental Earthquake Catalogs. Pure Appl. Geophys. 175, 685–705 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-017-1659-y

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