An Empirical Ground-Motion Prediction Model for Induced Earthquakes in Central and Eastern United States

Session: Numerical Modeling of Rupture Dynamics, Earthquake Ground Motion and Seismic Noise [Poster]
Type: Poster
Date: 4/29/2020
Time: 08:00 AM
Room: Ballroom
Description: 

This study presents a new ground motion model (GMM) for induced earthquakes for Central and Eastern United States (CEUS). During the last decade, the rate of human activities in the CEUS regions has increased. According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reports, the number of small to moderate induced earthquakes has increased dramatically since 2009 in Arkansas, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas. Most of the induced seismic events have been related to wastewater disposal associated with oil and gas production. This huge number of induced seismic events have renewed research interest in this area.

Generally, GMMs are used to improve short-term and real-time probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA). For seismic hazard evaluation in CEUS, scientists are looking at both tectonic and human-made earthquakes.

In this study, we focus on induced seismic data for a magnitude range of 3 to 6 at a hypocentral distance of up to 200 km.

For this study, an extensive database containing 31,593 horizontal-component recorded ground-motions from 2,608 seismic events are considered. The selected database is part of Gupta et al. (2017) and Moschetti et al. (2019) ground-motion databases. Additionally, the model has been developed to predict PGA and PSAs for a spectral periods of 0.01 to 5.00s. The proposed GMM model has the potential to be used in soft-to-rock site conditions for VS30 ranging 150 to 800 m/s.

The proposed empirical GMM model terms are obtained using a “mixed effect” regression method. A comprehensive residual analysis is performed considering inter-event and intra-event components of strong motion variability with respect to the distance, magnitude and site conditions. The final suggested functional form of the GMM will take into account differences in the earthquake occurrences, source, wave propagation and site-response characteristics.

Presenting Author: Zoya Farajpour

Authors