Uncertainty of Earthquake Losses due to Model Uncertainty of Input Ground Motions in the Los Angeles Area

2006 ◽  
Vol 96 (2) ◽  
pp. 365-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Cao
2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 1183-1207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rui Chen ◽  
David M. Branum ◽  
Chris J. Wills

We update annualized and scenario earthquake loss estimations for California using HAZUS, a loss estimation tool developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and evaluate the effects of changes in input ground motions over the last decade on estimated earthquake losses. Our estimated statewide average earthquake loss to building stock from shaking is approximately $2.8 billion per year, with 32% of it occurring in Los Angeles County and 23% in the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metropolitan statistical area. This estimate reflects a 25% to 28% reduction because of changes in input ground motions. Scenario results indicate a 28% to 63% reduction in estimated building economic losses because of changes in input ground motions. Changes in input ground motions are mainly attributed to the use of next generation attenuation relations and, to a lesser extent, to updated earthquake source models and differing approaches for incorporating near-surface site effects.


2021 ◽  
pp. 875529302098197
Author(s):  
Jack W Baker ◽  
Sanaz Rezaeian ◽  
Christine A Goulet ◽  
Nicolas Luco ◽  
Ganyu Teng

This manuscript describes a subset of CyberShake numerically simulated ground motions that were selected and vetted for use in engineering response-history analyses. Ground motions were selected that have seismological properties and response spectra representative of conditions in the Los Angeles area, based on disaggregation of seismic hazard. Ground motions were selected from millions of available time series and were reviewed to confirm their suitability for response-history analysis. The processes used to select the time series, the characteristics of the resulting data, and the provided documentation are described in this article. The resulting data and documentation are available electronically.


2021 ◽  
pp. 875529302110039
Author(s):  
Filippos Filippitzis ◽  
Monica D Kohler ◽  
Thomas H Heaton ◽  
Robert W Graves ◽  
Robert W Clayton ◽  
...  

We study ground-motion response in urban Los Angeles during the two largest events (M7.1 and M6.4) of the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence using recordings from multiple regional seismic networks as well as a subset of 350 stations from the much denser Community Seismic Network. In the first part of our study, we examine the observed response spectral (pseudo) accelerations for a selection of periods of engineering significance (1, 3, 6, and 8 s). Significant ground-motion amplification is present and reproducible between the two events. For the longer periods, coherent spectral acceleration patterns are visible throughout the Los Angeles Basin, while for the shorter periods, the motions are less spatially coherent. However, coherence is still observable at smaller length scales due to the high spatial density of the measurements. Examining possible correlations of the computed response spectral accelerations with basement depth and Vs30, we find the correlations to be stronger for the longer periods. In the second part of the study, we test the performance of two state-of-the-art methods for estimating ground motions for the largest event of the Ridgecrest earthquake sequence, namely three-dimensional (3D) finite-difference simulations and ground motion prediction equations. For the simulations, we are interested in the performance of the two Southern California Earthquake Center 3D community velocity models (CVM-S and CVM-H). For the ground motion prediction equations, we consider four of the 2014 Next Generation Attenuation-West2 Project equations. For some cases, the methods match the observations reasonably well; however, neither approach is able to reproduce the specific locations of the maximum response spectral accelerations or match the details of the observed amplification patterns.


1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen H. Hartzell ◽  
Stephen C. Harmsen ◽  
Arthur D. Frankel ◽  
David L. Carver ◽  
Edward Cranswick ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 1311-1328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ganyu Teng ◽  
Jack Baker

This paper evaluates CyberShake (version 15.12) ground motions for potential application to high-rise building design in the Los Angeles region by comparing them against recordings from past earthquakes as well as empirical models. We consider two selected sites in the Los Angeles region with different underlying soil conditions and select comparable suites of ground motion records from CyberShake and the NGA-West2 database according to the ASCE 7-16 requirements. Major observations include (1) selected ground motions from CyberShake and NGA-West2 share similar features, in terms of response spectra and polarization; (2) when selecting records from Cyber-Shake, it is easy to select motions with sources that match the hazard deaggregation; (3) CyberShake durations on soil are consistent with the empirical models considered, whereas durations on rock are slightly shorter; (4) occasional excessive polarization in ground motion is produced by San Andreas fault ruptures, though those records are usually excluded after the ground motion selection. Results from this study suggest that CyberShake ground motions are a suitable and promising source of ground motions for engineering evaluations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 109 (5) ◽  
pp. 1812-1828 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nenad Bijelić ◽  
Ting Lin ◽  
Gregory G. Deierlein

Abstract Limited data on strong earthquakes and their effect on structures pose challenges of making reliable risk assessments of tall buildings. For instance, although the collapse safety of tall buildings is likely controlled by large‐magnitude earthquakes with long durations and high low‐frequency content, there are few available recorded ground motions to evaluate these issues. The influence of geologic basins on amplifying ground‐motion effects raises additional questions. Absent recorded motions from past large magnitude earthquakes, physics‐based ground‐motion simulations provide a viable alternative. This article examines collapse risk and drift demands of a 20‐story archetype tall building using ground motions at four sites in the Los Angeles (LA) basin. Seismic demands of the building are calculated form nonlinear structural analyses using large datasets (∼500,000 ground motions per site) of unscaled, site‐specific simulated seismograms. Seismic hazard and building performance from direct analysis of Southern California Earthquake Center CyberShake motions are contrasted with values obtained based on conventional approaches that rely on recorded motions coupled with probabilistic seismic hazard assessments. At the LA downtown site, the two approaches yield similar estimates of mean annual frequency of collapse (λc), whereas nonlinear drift demands estimated with direct analysis are slightly larger primarily because of differences in hazard curves. Conversely, at the deep basin site, the CyberShake‐based analysis yields around seven times larger λc than the conventional approach, and both hazard and spectral shapes of the motions drive the differences. Deaggregation of collapse risk is used to identify the relative contributions of causal earthquakes, linking building responses with specific seismograms and contrasting collapse risk with hazard. A strong discriminative power of average spectral acceleration and significant duration for predicting collapse is observed.


1988 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. W. Campbell

The Ml=5.9 Whittier Narrows, California, earthquake triggered several hundred accelerographs in the greater Los Angeles area. One-hundred and sixty-eight of these were used to develop attenuation relationships for peak horizontal acceleration. The analysis indicates that the attenuation of peak acceleration during the earthquake was generally consistent with that predicted from the attenuation relationships of Campbell (in press). However, the acceleration amplitudes were about 65-percent higher than predicted. An analysis of residuals clearly showed that the ground motions recorded during this earthquake were influenced by a complex interaction of source mechanism, building embedment, site geology, and geography. Source effects may have been responsible for the higher-than-expected accelerations as well as some of the observed azimuthal variation. The correlation of peak acceleration with geography may have been caused in part by the gross geologic structure of the region. Buildings with basements were observed to have lower accelerations than ground-level sites, consistent with previous results. Accelerations from rock sites—especially those from hard rock sites—were found to have lower amplitudes and greater variability than those from soil sites. The larger variability may be due in part to topographic effects. All sites located within about 20 km of the fault recorded about the same level of acceleration whether they were sited on deep soil, soft rock, or hard rock. Shallow-soil sites, however, had higher-than-average accelerations at relatively short distances, but lower-than-average accelerations at longer distances. Their behavior at long distances was more consistent with that of the underlying rock rather than that of the overlying soil, no doubt reflecting the longer wavelengths of the more distant ground motions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 110 (4) ◽  
pp. 1530-1548 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grace A. Parker ◽  
Annemarie S. Baltay ◽  
John Rekoske ◽  
Eric M. Thompson

ABSTRACT We use a large instrumental dataset from the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence (Rekoske et al., 2019, 2020) to examine repeatable source-, path-, and site-specific ground motions. A mixed-effects analysis is used to partition total residuals relative to the Boore et al. (2014; hereafter, BSSA14) ground-motion model. We calculate the Arias intensity stress drop for the earthquakes and find strong correlation with our event terms, indicating that they are consistent with source processes. We look for physically meaningful trends in the partitioned residuals and test the ability of BSSA14 to capture the behavior we observe in the data. We find that BSSA14 is a good match to the median observations for M>4. However, we find bias for individual events, especially those with small magnitude and hypocentral depth≥7  km, for which peak ground acceleration is underpredicted by a factor of 2.5. Although the site amplification term captures the median site response when all sites are considered together, it does not capture variations at individual stations across a range of site conditions. We find strong basin amplification in the Los Angeles, Ventura, and San Gabriel basins. We find weak amplification in the San Bernardino basin, which is contrary to simulation-based findings showing a channeling effect from an event with a north–south azimuth. This and an additional set of ground motions from earthquakes southwest of Los Angeles suggest that there is an azimuth-dependent southern California basin response related to the orientation of regional structures when ground motion from waves traveling south–north are compared with those in the east–west direction. These findings exhibit the power of large, spatially dense ground-motion datasets and make clear that nonergodic models are a way to reduce bias and uncertainty in ground-motion estimation for applications like the U.S. Geological Survey National Seismic Hazard Model and the ShakeAlert earthquake early warning System.


2019 ◽  
Vol 109 (4) ◽  
pp. 1524-1541 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth S. Cochran ◽  
Julian Bunn ◽  
Sarah E. Minson ◽  
Annemarie S. Baltay ◽  
Deborah L. Kilb ◽  
...  

Abstract We test the Japanese ground‐motion‐based earthquake early warning (EEW) algorithm, propagation of local undamped motion (PLUM), in southern California with application to the U.S. ShakeAlert system. In late 2018, ShakeAlert began limited public alerting in Los Angeles to areas of expected modified Mercalli intensity (IMMI) 4.0+ for magnitude 5.0+ earthquakes. Most EEW systems, including ShakeAlert, use source‐based methods: they estimate the location, magnitude, and origin time of an earthquake from P waves and use a ground‐motion prediction equation to identify regions of expected strong shaking. The PLUM algorithm uses observed ground motions directly to define alert areas and was developed to address deficiencies in the Japan Meteorological Agency source‐based EEW system during the 2011 Mw 9.0 Tohoku earthquake sequence. We assess PLUM using (a) a dataset of 193 magnitude 3.5+ earthquakes that occurred in southern California between 2012 and 2017 and (b) the ShakeAlert testing and certification suite of 49 earthquakes and other seismic signals. The latter suite includes events that challenge the current ShakeAlert algorithms. We provide a first‐order performance assessment using event‐based metrics similar to those used by ShakeAlert. We find that PLUM can be configured to successfully issue alerts using IMMI trigger thresholds that are lower than those implemented in Japan. Using two stations, a trigger threshold of IMMI 4.0 for the first station and a threshold of IMMI 2.5 for the second station PLUM successfully detect 12 of 13 magnitude 5.0+ earthquakes and issue no false alerts. PLUM alert latencies were similar to and in some cases faster than source‐based algorithms, reducing area that receives no warning near the source that generally have the highest ground motions. PLUM is a simple, independent seismic method that may complement existing source‐based algorithms in EEW systems, including the ShakeAlert system, even when alerting to light (IMMI 4.0) or higher ground‐motion levels.


1996 ◽  
Vol 86 (5) ◽  
pp. 1417-1433
Author(s):  
T. L. Teng ◽  
J. Qu

Abstract During a big earthquake along the San Andreas fault in southern California, high excitation and low attenuation of long-period (3 to 10 sec) strong ground motions will cause wave motions to propagate efficiently far from the epicentral area. These ground motions could potentially be destructive to large-dimension structures in the Los Angeles basin. We performed calculations using the surface-wave Gaussian beam method for a 3D southern California crustal structure. Displacement field as well as the associated dynamic strain field produced by large propagating ruptures along the San Andreas fault are evaluated. Results indicate that in the presence of lateral heterogeneity, focusing and multipathing interference contribute significantly to a complex pattern of the displacement field and the associated dynamic strain field. For a big event on the San Andreas fault with a seismic moment of 1.8 × 1028 dyne-cm, long-period displacement in the Los Angeles basin could reach a maximum amplitude of meters in places. Since this calculation is fast, we have evaluated the displacement field for a dense grid of points; a differentiation gives the corresponding effective horizontal dynamic strain field. At times, the maximum effective dynamic strains may reach mid-10−3 to even 10−3—high enough to be of engineering concern. This computational result probably gives the upper bound values due to the large source assumed. For events of smaller seismic moment release along less extensive ruptures, these results can easily be scaled down proportionally. Different scenarios are considered in this study with different slip distributions. It is found that with a given seismic moment, a more evenly distributed fault slip over the rupture surface will result in lower peak values on both displacements and dynamic strains. Our displacement results give similar values to those obtained by Kanamori using empirical Green's functions but substantially higher than Bouchon and Aki's results.


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