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Toward an empirical ground motion prediction equation for France: accounting for regional differences in the source stress parameter

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Abstract

In low-to-moderate seismicity regions such as metropolitan France, characterized by limited strong-motion records in the magnitude-distance range of interest for seismic hazard assessment, the derivation of empirical ground motion prediction equations (GMPEs) is a major challenge. In this study, we take advantage of the RESORCE-2013 database (http://resorce-portal.eu/) that contains uniformly processed records for the Pan-European region including relevant number of French records. After discussing the metadata for French events and stations, we first derive a base-case GMPE that is used to investigate the within-event and between-event residuals. The short-period between-event residuals for French (and Swiss) events show larger variability with respect to larger magnitude events in other regions. We show that the between-event residuals are clearly correlated with the stress parameter and that such larger variability can be explained by accounting for stress-parameter scaling. We derive an empirical scaling of ground motion with stress parameter that is consistent across regions and with the scaling predicted by stochastic GMPEs. This suggests that the scaling of ground motion with stress parameter for a given magnitude is largely region independent whereas the absolute stress parameter values may vary regionally. Based on these results we propose to adopt the scaling model as a function of stress parameter and magnitude by Yenier and Atkinson (Bull Seismol Soc Am 105(4):1989–2009, 2015) by adapting the reference stress parameter to our target regions. By accounting for stress parameter scaling in the GMPE we reduce the between-event variability for French and Swiss small-magnitude events. Finally, we investigate the aleatory variability (σ) of the GMPE and its components (τ, ϕ, ϕss). We propose a heteroscedastic σ model to be used when the stress-parameter scaling is not considered in the GMPEs due to lack of information. If enough information on the stress-parameter is available the adjusted GMPE can be applied using a homoscedastic σ. Despite using small events, the ϕss for French stations is found to be consistent with other studies and confirms the stability of ϕss across different regions and datasets.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the SeIsmic Ground-Motion Assessment (SIGMA) project funded by EDF, AREVA, CEA and ENEL. The authors would like to warmly thank the coordination team, as well as all the participants in the project, for the stimulating discussions during the project workshops. The SIGMA scientific committee members Frank Scherbaum, John Douglas, Jean Savy provided useful comments and criticism on early versions of this study. We thank two anonymous reviewers for the careful revisions the helped improving the quality of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Geoter SAS - Fugro, Auriol, France

    Gabriele Ameri & Stéphane Drouet

  2. EDF, CEIDRE/TEGG/SGG, Aix-en-Provence, France

    Paola Traversa

  3. German Research Centre for Geosciences, GFZ, Potsdam, Germany

    Dino Bindi & Fabrice Cotton

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  1. Gabriele Ameri
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  2. Stéphane Drouet
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Correspondence to Gabriele Ameri.

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Ameri, G., Drouet, S., Traversa, P. et al. Toward an empirical ground motion prediction equation for France: accounting for regional differences in the source stress parameter. Bull Earthquake Eng 15, 4681–4717 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10518-017-0171-1

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