Simulation-Based Seismic Hazard Assessment Using Monte-Carlo Earthquake Catalogs: Application to CyberShake

Abstract

ABSTRACT The use of numerical simulations in probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) has achieved a promising level of reliability in recent years. One example is the CyberShake project, which incorporates physics-based 3D ground-motion simulations within seismic hazard calculations. Nonetheless, considerable computational time and resources are required due to the significant processing requirements imposed by source-based models on one hand, and the large number of seismic sources and possible rupture variations on the other. This article proposes to use a less computationally demanding simulation-based PSHA framework for CyberShake. The framework can accurately represent the seismic hazard at a site, by only considering a subset of all the possible earthquake scenarios, based on a Monte-Carlo simulation procedure that generates earthquake catalogs having a specified duration. In this case, ground motions need only be simulated for the scenarios selected in the earthquake catalog, and hazard calculations are limited to this subset of scenarios. To validate the method and evaluate its accuracy in the CyberShake platform, the proposed framework is applied to three sites in southern California, and hazard calculations are performed for earthquake catalogs with different lengths. The resulting hazard curves are then benchmarked against those obtained by considering the entire set of earthquake scenarios and simulations, as done in CyberShake. Both approaches yield similar estimates of the hazard curves for elastic pseudospectral accelerations and inelastic demands, with errors that depend on the length of the Monte-Carlo catalog. With 200,000 yr catalogs, the errors are consistently smaller than 5% at the 2% probability of exceedance in 50 yr hazard level, using only ∼3% of the entire set of simulations. Both approaches also produce similar disaggregation patterns. The results demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach in a simulation-based PSHA platform like CyberShake and as a ground-motion selection tool for seismic demand analyses.