Seismic hazard analysis: a comparative study

The quantitative seismic hazard maps for the 1970s National Building Code of Canada were evaluated using the Davenport-Milne method. The Cornell-McGuire method is employed to develop recent seismic hazard maps of Canada. These methods incorporate the information on seismicity, magnitude-recurrence relations, and ground motion (or response) attenuation relations. The former preserves and depends completely on details of the historical seismicity; the latter smoothes the irregular spatial occurrence pattern of the historical seismicity into seismic source zones. Further, the Epicentral Cell method, which attempts to incorporate the preserving and smoothing aspect of these methods, has been developed. However, the impact of the adopted assumptions on the estimated quantitative seismic hazard has not been investigated. This study provides a comparative seismic hazard assessment using the above-mentioned methods and simulation-based algorithms. The analysis results show that overall the Davenport-Milne method gives quasi-circular seismic hazard contours near significant historical events, and the Cornell-McGuire method smoothes the transition of contours. The Epicentral Cell method provides estimates approximately within the former and the latter.