A Seismologically Consistent Surface Rupture Length Model for Unbounded and Width-Limited Events

Grigorios Lavrentiadis, Yongfei Wang, Norman A. Abrahamson, Yousef Bozorgnia, & Christine A. Goulet

Published November 23, 2023, SCEC Contribution #12712

A new surface-rupture-length (SRL) relationship as a function of magnitude (M), fault thickness, and fault dip angle is presented in this paper.
The objective of this study is to model the change in scaling between unbounded and width-limited ruptures.
This is achieved through the use of seismological-theory-based relationships for the average displacement scaling and the aid of dynamic fault rupture simulations to constrain the rupture width scaling.
The empirical dataset used in the development of this relationship is composed of 123 events ranging from M 5 to 8.1 and SRL 1.1 to 432 km.
The dynamic rupture simulations dataset includes 554 events ranging from M 4.9 to 8.2 and SRL 1 to 655 km.
For the average displacement (D) scaling, three simple models and two composite models were evaluated.
The simple average displacement models were: a square root of the rupture area (sqrt_A), a down-dip width (W), and a rupture length (L) proportional model.
The two composite models followed a sqrt_A scaling for unbounded ruptures and transitioned to W and L scaling for width-limited events, respectively.
The empirical data favors a D ~ A scaling for both unbounded and width-limited ruptures.
The proposed model exhibits better predictive performance compared to linear log(SRL) ~ M type models, especially in the large magnitude range, which is dominated by width-limited events.
A comparison with existing SRL models shows consistent scaling at different magnitude ranges that is believed to be the result of the different magnitude ranges in the empirical dataset of the published relationships.

Citation
Lavrentiadis, G., Wang, Y., Abrahamson, N. A., Bozorgnia, Y., & Goulet, C. A. (2023). A Seismologically Consistent Surface Rupture Length Model for Unbounded and Width-Limited Events. Earthquake Spectra,. doi: 10.1177/87552930231205871.