Intellectual Merit
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This project focuses on generating earthquake sources that produce synthetic ground motion relevant to engineering applications. This group’s goals fall directly in line with the SCEC5 science objectives, as well as the renewed call to ‘develop methodologies to validate ground motions from dynamic rupture simulations for systematic assessment of aleatory variability and epistemic uncertainty in simulated ground motions.’
Our group is a coordinated validation effort to model ground motions from dynamic ruptures. Our research focuses on improving models of earthquake rupture for applications to seismic hazard, utilizing a dynamic rupture approach to validate synthetically generated ground motion, that will both contribute to advancing knowledge in the area of dynamic rupture simulations, as well as understanding how seismic ground motions relate to complex earthquake ruptures.
This work is a continuation of a planned multi-year project. In the future, we envision selecting a few key representative historical earthquakes from the SCEC Broadband Simulation Platform (Goulet et al., 2015) that will be used to further ensure that the ground motion is consistent with that of strong ground motions records. Additionally, validation will be extended to include more complex events, such as both normal and reverse earthquakes, and iteratively expand the range of model parameters, larger domain, higher frequencies, etc... If these initial validation efforts are satisfactory, we plan to begin the process of going beyond the GMPEs, to demonstrate that dynamic rupture simulations have the potential to provide more information to inform seismic hazard for engineering applications. |
Broader Impacts
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This project works towards improving models of earthquake rupture for applications to seismic hazard. This has direct impact to the SCEC research community, especially by potential end users of simulations. The community will benefit from knowing how well the synthetics that result from dynamic rupture simulations compare to observed data or estimates from ground motion prediction equations (GMPEs). The multiple dynamic ruptures approaches used here will ultimately help guide several engineering decisions, such as impacting descriptions of building code and design.
Our group is composed of a broad array of individuals across all stages of career and background, including PhD students and several early-career members, such as postdocs (with representation from several minorities groups as well as international participants).
This project builds a synthetic database of ground motion amplitudes from a diverse range of initial conditions and modeling techniques. Additionally, we also keep track of final fault displacement along the surface trace of the fault. In the future, we intend to make our database publicly available, for use by a variety of other end-users and investigations. For example, it’s likely a few of our simulated events will have similar characteristics to recently recorded events (e.g. the Ridgecrest sequence), that may be used for additional validation and constraint of both surface slip and ground motion amplitudes. |