Tsunami hazard and risk assessment for multiple buildings by considering the spatial correlation of wave height using copulas

Abstract

Abstract. It is necessary to evaluate aggregate damage probability to multiple buildings when performing probabilistic risk assessment for the buildings. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate a method of tsunami hazard and risk assessment for two buildings far away from each other, using copulas of tsunami hazards that consider the nonlinear spatial correlation of tsunami wave heights. First, we simulated the wave heights considering uncertainty by varying the slip amount and fault depths. The frequency distributions of the wave heights were evaluated via the response surface method. Based on the distributions and numerically simulated wave heights, we estimated the optimal copula via maximum likelihood estimation. Subsequently, we evaluated the joint distributions of the wave heights and the aggregate damage probabilities via the marginal distributions and the estimated copulas. As a result, the aggregate damage probability of the 99th percentile value was approximately 1.0 % higher and the maximum value was approximately 3.0 % higher while considering the wave height correlation. We clearly showed the usefulness of copula modeling considering the wave height correlation in evaluating the probabilistic risk of multiple buildings. We only demonstrated the risk evaluation method for two buildings, but the effect of the wave height correlation on the results is expected to increase if more points are targeted.