A Non-ergodic Effective Amplitude Ground-Motion Model for California

TL;DR

This paper introduces a non-ergodic ground-motion model for effective amplitude spectral values in California, leveraging Bayesian hierarchical modeling to reduce variability and improve seismic hazard assessments.

Contribution

It develops a novel non-ergodic EAS ground-motion model using Bayesian methods, incorporating spatially varying source, path, and site effects for California.

Findings

30-40% reduction in aleatory standard deviation.

Smaller epistemic uncertainty near stations and past events.

Significant impact on hazard calculations at large return periods.

Abstract

A new non-ergodic ground-motion model (GMM) for effective amplitude spectral ($EAS$) values for California is presented in this study. $EAS$, which is defined in Goulet et al. (2018), is a smoothed rotation-independent Fourier amplitude spectrum of the two horizontal components of an acceleration time history. The main motivation for developing a non-ergodic $EAS$ GMM, rather than a spectral acceleration GMM, is that the scaling of $EAS$ does not depend on spectral shape, and therefore, the more frequent small magnitude events can be used in the estimation of the non-ergodic terms. The model is developed using the California subset of the NGAWest2 dataset Ancheta et al. (2013). The Bayless and Abrahamson (2019b) (BA18) ergodic $EAS$ GMM was used as backbone to constrain the average source, path, and site scaling. The non-ergodic GMM is formulated as a Bayesian hierarchical model: the non-ergodic source and site terms are modeled as spatially varying coefficients following the approach of Landwehr et al. (2016), and the non-ergodic path effects are captured by the cell-specific anelastic attenuation attenuation following the approach of Dawood and Rodriguez-Marek (2013). Close to stations and past events, the mean values of the non-ergodic terms deviate from zero to capture the systematic effects and their epistemic uncertainty is small. In areas with sparse data, the epistemic uncertainty of the non-ergodic terms is large, as the systematic effects cannot be determined. The non-ergodic total aleatory standard deviation is approximately $30$ to $40\%$ smaller than the total aleatory standard deviation of BA18. This reduction in the aleatory variability has a significant impact on hazard calculations at large return periods. The epistemic uncertainty of the ground motion predictions is small in areas close to stations and past events.