Reconstruction of earthquake hazard in regions of
sparse seismic monitoring
Amr S. Elnashai
Mid-America Earthquake Center, Department of Civil and Environmental
Engineering, University of Illinois Champaign,at Urbana-Urbana, IL, USA
Abstract:
Studying strong motion records and the spatial distribution of ground shaking is
of great importance in understanding the underlying causes of damage in
earthquakes. Many regions in the world are either not instrumented or are
sparsely instrumented. As such, significant opportunities for motion-damage
correlations are lost. Two recent and damaging earthquakes belong to the class
of lost opportunities, namely the Kashmir (Pakistan) earthquake of October 2005
and the Yogyakarta (Indonesia) earthquake of May 2006. In this paper, an
overview of the importance of supply and demand studies in earthquake-stricken
regions is given, followed by two examples of investigative engineering
seismology aimed at reconstructing the hazard from sparse data. The paper closes
with a plea for responsible authorities to invest in seismic monitoring networks
in the very near future.
Keywords: Kashmir earthquake; Yogyakarta (Indonesia)
earthquake; field investigation; hazard reconstruction; sparse seismic
monitoring; back-analysis; attenuation relationships
