Investigating the role of source mechanism, surface topography, and attenuation on the observed PGA pattern in May 28, 2004, Mw 6.2 Baladeh earthquake (Iran)
2016 (English)In: Journal of Seismology, ISSN 1383-4649, E-ISSN 1573-157X, Vol. 20, no 2, p. 495-510Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Resource type
Text
Abstract [en]
In this paper, we use seismic waveform simulation to investigate the influence of source mechanism complexity, surface topography, and quality factor on the observed peak ground motions in May 28, 2004, moment magnitude (Mw) 6.2 Baladeh earthquake. The observed peak ground acceleration (PGA) pattern in this event, which is the biggest earthquake to hit the Central Alborz Mountains of Iran in modern instrumental era, is irregular in some respects. First, the observed PGA contours are elongated toward north-west and, second, the maximum observed PGA value of 1049 cm/s(2) on the horizontal component of Hasan Keyf station 50 km away from the epicenter is quite high and irregular for an earthquake of this magnitude, at such long distance. In this study, we employ the spectral element method, implemented in SPECFEM3D software package to simulate the 3D wave propagation from several source models in the area. Our results suggest directivity effect is the main cause of the anomalous observations in this earthquake and could account for the elongation of PGA contours and also the anomalous maximum PGA value observed at Hasan Keyf strong motion station. We show that the surface topography has minor effect on the observed peak ground acceleration and the resulting PGA maps. Also by finding the bounds of seismic quality factor effect on the peak ground acceleration values, we show that this factor could not account for the elongation of iso-acceleration contours in the north-west direction.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2016. Vol. 20, no 2, p. 495-510
Keywords [en]
Seismic wave simulation, Ground-motion prediction, Spectral element method, Baladeh earthquake
National Category
Geophysics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-283759DOI: 10.1007/s10950-015-9540-xISI: 000372124500007OAI: oai:DiVA.org:uu-283759DiVA, id: diva2:919701
2016-04-142016-04-142017-11-30Bibliographically approved