Ground Motions

Quantification of extreme ground-motions

GFZ-Uni- Potsdam Graduate School

project duration: 2008-2013
PI: R. Wang, S. Hainzl, F. Scherbaum, M. Holschneider
Projectemployee: Katrin Kieling

The understanding and modeling of ground motions related to earthquake ruptures is of major importance for seismic hazard analysis. In particular for regions of low to moderate seismicity, uncertainty of seismic hazard estimates may be driven completely by the uncertainties related to the knowledge of ground motion variability close to the source. The aim of this project is to characterize the ground motions, in particular, their extremes as well as their variability, based on computer simulations and observations. For the simulations, a new code recently developed in our group is available allowing the computation of the complete wave field up to high frequencies in an exact way for a layered half-space. In the first step of the project, these simulations will be combined with realistic earthquake rupture scenarios to generate synthetic ground motion models. In a second step, the scaling properties will be calibrated to recent well-recorded data sets. In a third step, we will use the calibrated model to forecast ground-motions in low seismicity regions. Additionally, the possible correlations between extreme ground motions and the aftershock occurrence will be analyzed in this project.
The developed software-package is documented under http://trac.gfz-potsdam.de/GroundMotions and may be downloaded via SVN after getting in contact with the developpers.