Assessment of the ground motion levels for the Vrancea (Romania) November 1940 earthquake

Florin Pavel () and Radu Vacareanu ()

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2015, vol. 78, issue 2, 1469-1480

Abstract: This short paper focuses on the evaluation of the ground motions levels likely experienced in ten cities seriously damaged during the November 1940 intermediate-depth Vrancea (Romania) earthquake (M W = 7.7). In the first step of the analysis, the ground motion levels are evaluated using a recently developed ground motion model (Vacareanu et al. in J Earthq Eng 19(3):535–562, 2015 ) for the Vrancea intermediate-depth seismic source. Next, the stochastic method of simulation (Boore in Pure App Geophys 160:635–676, 2003 ) is employed in the same purpose. In order to include the nonlinear soil effects into the results of the stochastic simulations, a dedicated amplification function is derived from the ground motions recorded during two large magnitude Vrancea earthquakes in 1986 and 1990. The results obtained for the November 1940 Vrancea earthquake show that the largest spectral ordinates are obtained when the nonlinear soil effects are taken into consideration, while the peak ground accelerations are in almost all cases in excess of 0.15 g. In addition, the results for Bucharest are validated through a site-specific response analysis performed using a soil profile from the literature. This site response analysis for the 1940 seismic event reveals long-period spectral amplitudes, similar to the ones observed in Bucharest during the Vrancea 1977 earthquake. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords: Hypocentral distance; Spectral accelerations; Stochastic simulations; Ground motion model; Nonlinear soil effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-015-1767-x (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:78:y:2015:i:2:p:1469-1480

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

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-015-1767-x

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 ().