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Correction factors for GMMs considering site and topographic effects in South Korea

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Abstract

In the past five years, the local magnitude (ML) 5.8 Gyeongju and ML5.4 Pohang earthquakes have caused significant damage to the southeastern Korean Peninsula. To evaluate the ground motion recorded during these earthquakes, we compared them with the Korean ground motion models (GMMs), also known as the ground motion prediction equations (GMPEs), Next Generation Attenuation of Ground Motions (NGA) GMMs for Western U.S. and Central and Eastern North America. The ground motions exhibit amplification near a period of 0.1 s compared to the predicted spectral accelerations. These amplifications are likely to be attributed to site and topographic effects. The existing GMMs do not account for the topographic amplification which might be prevalent in the mountainous regions of Korea. Therefore, we propose correction factors for the predicted ground motions for various periods in terms of magnitude, source-to-site distance, VS30, and relative elevation. The standard deviation values of the residuals significantly decreased by applying these correction models.

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Availability of data and material

We acquired the ground motion records from the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) at https://necis.kma.go.kr/ (last accessed 28 July 2020). Some of the VS30 data used in this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank anonymous reviewers and Dr. Sean Ahdi for their constructive comments that have greatly helped us going over many details in the original submission.

Funding

This work was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (MSIT) (NRF-2020R1C1C1013317) and a grant (2020-MOIS31-013) of the Fundamental Technology Development Program for Extreme Disaster Response funded by Ministry of Interior and Safety (MOIS, Korea).

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  1. Heon-Joon Park and Hyejin Lee have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil Engineering, Seoul National University of Science and Technology (SeoulTech), 232 Gongneung-ro, Seoul, 01811, Korea

    Heon-Joon Park

  2. School of Urban and Environmental Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), 50 UNIST-gil, Ulsan, 44919, Korea

    Hyejin Lee & Byungmin Kim

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  1. Heon-Joon Park
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Correspondence to Byungmin Kim.

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Park, HJ., Lee, H. & Kim, B. Correction factors for GMMs considering site and topographic effects in South Korea. Bull Earthquake Eng 20, 143–165 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10518-021-01229-3

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