Estimation of seismic hazard and risks for the Himalayas and surrounding regions based on Unified Scaling Law for Earthquakes

Imtiyaz Parvez (), Anastasia Nekrasova and Vladimir Kossobokov

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2014, vol. 71, issue 1, 549-562

Abstract: To estimate seismic hazard, the basic law of seismicity, the Gutenberg–Richter recurrence relation, is applied in a modified form involving a spatial term: $$\log N\left( {M,\;L} \right)=A - B\left( {M - 5} \right) + C\log L$$ log N M , L = A - B M - 5 + C log L , where N(M,L) is the expected annual number of earthquakes of a certain magnitude M within an area of linear size L. The parameters A, B, and C of this Unified Scaling Law for Earthquakes (USLE) in the Himalayas and surrounding regions have been studied on the basis of a variable space and time-scale approach. The observed temporal variability of the A, B, and C coefficients indicates significant changes of seismic activity at the time scales of a few decades. At global scale, the value of A ranges mainly between −1.0 and 0.5, which determines the average rate of earthquakes that accordingly differs by a factor of 30 or more. The value of B concentrates about 0.9 ranging from under 0.6 to above 1.1, while the fractal dimension of the local seismic prone setting, C, changes from 0.5 to 1.4 and larger. For Himalayan region, the values of A, B, and C have been estimated mainly ranging from −1.6 to −1.0, from 0.8 to 1.3, and from 1.0 to 1.4, respectively. We have used the deterministic approach to map the local value of the expected peak ground acceleration (PGA) from the USLE estimated maximum magnitude or, if reliable estimation was not possible, from the observed maximum magnitude during 1900–2012. In result, the seismic hazard map of the Himalayas with spatially distributed PGA was prepared. Further, an attempt is made to generate a series of the earthquake risk maps of the region based on the population density exposed to the seismic hazard. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Keywords: Himalayas; Seismic hazard; Unified Scaling Law; Seismic risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-013-0926-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:71:y:2014:i:1:p:549-562

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-013-0926-1

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().