Subduction ground motions in northern South America are about a factor of 2 smaller than the ground motions for similar events in other regions. Nevertheless, historical and recent large-interface and intermediate-depth slab earthquakes of moment magnitudes Mw = 7.8 (Ecuador, 2016) and 7.2 (Colombia, 2012) evidenced the vast potential damage that vulnerable populations close to earthquake epicenters could experience. This article proposes a new empirical ground-motion prediction model for subduction events in northern South America, a regionalization of the global AG2020 ground-motion prediction equations. An updated ground-motion database curated by the Colombian Geological Survey is employed. It comprises recordings from earthquakes associated with the subduction of the Nazca plate gathered by the National Strong Motion Network in Colombia and by the Institute of Geophysics at Escuela Politécnica Nacional in Ecuador. The regional terms of our model are estimated with 539 records from 60 subduction events in Colombia and Ecuador with epicenters in the range of −0.6° to 7.6°N and 75.5° to 79.6°W, with Mw≥4.5, hypocentral depth range of 4 ≤  Zhypo ≤ 210 km, for distances up to 350 km. The model includes forearc and backarc terms to account for larger attenuation at backarc sites for slab events and site categorization based on natural period. The proposed model corrects the median AG2020 global model to better account for the larger attenuation of local ground motions and includes a partially non-ergodic variance model.

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Objective assessment of the seismic response of engineering systems is achievable through estimating the rate of exceedance (risk) of the engineering-demand parameters (EDPs), which are usually obtained by performing dynamic analyses with incrementally scaled seed ground motions. However, assigning rates of occurrence to such EDPs is difficult because the input ground motions are inconsistent with those that go into the hazard estimation. The Conditional Scenario Spectra (CSS) are a set of realistic ground-motion spectra with assigned rates of occurrence that reproduce the hazard at a site over various hazard levels and over a period range. The CSS methodology is an improvement over the CS method in that it includes the additional step of adjusting the rates to ensure the consistency of the target hazard. In this article, a step-by-step procedure for estimating the CSS is presented. The analysis of a structural system illustrates the uses of the CSS set for assessing EDPs over a wide range of demand intensity so that the estimation of the risk of these EDPs can be accomplished with ease.

Crustal earthquakes are some of the main contributors to the seismic hazard in northern South America (NoSAm). There is evidence of historical crustal events with epicenters near populated cities, such as the 1999 Mw 6.2 Coffee Region earthquake, whose damages added up to 1.9% of Colombia’s gross domestic product and reported about 1200 deaths. Because the global crustal ground-motion models (GMMs) routinely used in seismic hazard assessments of the region are biased with respect to the available ground-motion records, this article presents a regional GMM developed using local data from earthquakes in Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. The filtered database contains 709 triaxial records from 56 earthquakes, recorded at 92 stations between 1994 and 2020 by the Colombian Geological Survey. The moment magnitudes of the events range between 4.5 and 6.8, with hypocentral depths ≤60 km. The model covers rupture distances ≤350 km. The model site amplification is based on a categorization approach relying on the predominant site period, identified through the horizontal-to-vertical response ratios of 5%-damped response spectra. The proposed GMM is developed as a regionalization of the global Next Generation Attenuation-West2 Project ASK14 model. Our model corrects the misfit of the ASK14 GMM with respect to the observed ground-motion data in NoSAm for moderate magnitudes and intermediate to large distances while keeping the extrapolation capabilities. The proposed GMM considers the added attenuation for ray paths crossing the volcanic arc. Analysis of the variance components allows approximating plausible reductions of the standard deviation in future nonergodic models.

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