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Impact of local site conditions on portfolio earthquake loss estimation for different building types

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Abstract

This article presents a sensitivity analysis investigating the impact of using high-resolution site conditions databases in portfolio earthquake loss estimation. This article also estimates the effects of variability in the site condition databases on probabilistic earthquake loss ratios and their geographical pattern with respect to structural characteristics of different building types. To perform the earthquake loss estimation here, the OpenQuake software developed by Global Earthquake Model is implemented in Clemson University’s supercomputer. The probabilistic event-based risk analysis is employed considering several notional portfolios of different building types in the San Francisco area as the inventory exposure. This analysis produces the stochastic event sets worth for 10,000 years including almost 8000 synthetically simulated earthquakes. Then, the ground motion prediction equations are used to calculate the ground motion per event and incorporate the effect of five site conditions, on amplifying or de-amplifying the ground motions on notional building exposure locations. Notional buildings are used to account for various building characteristics in conformance with the building taxonomy represented in HAZUS software. The HAZUS damage functions are applied to model the vulnerability of various structural types of buildings. Finally, the 50-year average mean loss and probabilistic loss for multiple values for probability of exceedance (2, 10, 20, and 40%) in 50 years are calculated, and the impact of different site condition databases on portfolio loss ratios is investigated for different structural types and heights of buildings. The results show the aggregated and geographical variation of loss and loss ratio throughout the region for various site conditions. Comparing the aggregated loss and loss ratio, while considering different databases, represents normalized differences that are limited to 6% for all building taxonomy with various heights and for all PoEs. However, site-specific loss ratio errors are significantly greater and in some cases are more than 20%.

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Reproduced with permission from GEM (2012a, b)

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Reproduced with permission from Brownlow (2017)

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Risk Engineering and System Analytics (RESA) center and the Palmetto Cluster managing team (Dr. Marcin Ziolkowski and Ashwin Trikuta Srinath) for their support throughout this research. Their help and permission are gratefully acknowledged; however, the authors take sole responsibility for the content of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Glenn Department of Civil Engineering, Clemson University, Clemson, USA

    Elnaz Peyghaleh, Vahidreza Mahmoudabadi, James R. Martin, Qiushi Chen & Mohammad Javanbarg

  2. Property and Special Risks, AIG, New York, USA

    Alireza Shahjouei

  3. Client Risk Solutions, AIG, New York, USA

    Mohammad Javanbarg

  4. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Clarkson University, Potsdam, USA

    Sara Khoshnevisan

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  1. Elnaz Peyghaleh
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Correspondence to Elnaz Peyghaleh.

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Peyghaleh, E., Mahmoudabadi, V., Martin, J.R. et al. Impact of local site conditions on portfolio earthquake loss estimation for different building types. Nat Hazards 94, 121–150 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-018-3377-x

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