Developing Ground Motion Shaking Map for Sarpol-e Zahab, Iran (2017) Earthquake

Providing appropriate near real time ground motion shaking map is a critical requirement to effectively manage the consequence of an earthquake. In the present study, the standard procedure adopted by USGS ShakeMap to develop the ground motion shaking map is calibrated to implement in Iran. Selecting appropriate ground motion predictions equation and properly modeling of the local site condition are two important parameters that should be properly modeled to provide an appropriate ground motion shaking map. Here, a set of local, regional and global GMPEs that show good performance in the previous studies are adopted. Besides, the approach developed by Borcherdt [1] is used to take into account the local site condition. The VS30 of the region exploited from the proxy approach proposed by Wald and Allen [2]. The study evaluates the potential applicability of this method by compiling a database of measured and estimated VS30. The results indicate that the method outperforms than random selection of the site class. The calibrated model implements to generate the ground motion shaking map of the Sarpol-e Zahab, Iran earthquake (2017). The result shows that the approach performs better than employing GMPEs alone. The calibrated model can be used to generate the database of ground motion shaking of past earthquakes in Iran, which is an important requirement to develop empirical fragility or vulnerability models.