Events Calendar

Spatial correlation of earthquake ground motion intensities: ...

...measurement and implications for regional infrastructure risk.Speaker: Dr. Jack W. Baker, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford UniversityAbstract:Risk assessment of spatially distributed building portfolios or infrastructure systems requires quantification of the joint occurrence of ground-motion intensities at several sites, during the same earthquake. This talk will present an overview of techniques to quantify the needed joint distributions using observations from past earthquakes, and describe how these distributions can be used in probabilistic seismic risk assessments of spatially-distributed lifelines. Lifeline risk assessment presents challenges related to describing ground-motion intensity over a region, and related to the computationally expensive task of repeatedly analyzing performance of a lifeline system under many damage scenarios. A simulation-based framework will be presented that develops a small but stochastically-representative catalog of earthquake ground-motion intensity maps that can be used for lifeline risk assessment. The approach dramatically reduces required computational expense, while also maintaining a set of simulations that is consistent with all conventional probabilistic seismic hazard analysis calculations. The feasibility of the proposed approach is illustrated by using it to assess the seismic risk of a simplified model of the San Francisco Bay Area transportation network. A catalog of only 150 intensity maps is generated to represent hazard at 1,038 sites from ten regional fault segments causing earthquakes with magnitudes between five and eight.

Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Evangeline Reyes