Nonergodic Ground-Motion Models for Subduction Zone and Crustal Earthquakes in Japan

Abstract

We investigate the nonergodic behavior of ground motions from subduction zone earthquakes and crustal earthquakes in Japan using the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience strong-motion flatfile together with various reference ergodic ground-motion models (GMMs). For the nonergodic path effects, our nonergodic GMM has two path effects terms: a cell-specific linear-distance scaling, denoted as δP2PQ, that mimics the effects of a 3D Q structure, and a source- and site-specific term related to the effects of the 3D velocity structure, denoted δP2PV. The resulting model provides spatially varying nonergodic source, site, and path terms. The GMM smoothly interpolates and extrapolates the nonergodic terms in space so that the GMM can be applied to any combination of source and site locations in the region. In regions where data are sparse, the median nonergodic terms will approach zero but with large epistemic uncertainty. Over the period range of 0–10 s, the ranges of the standard deviations of the nonergodic source, path, and site terms are 0.2–0.65, 0.25–0.40, and 0.15–0.40 natural log units, respectively. The fully nonergodic models lead to a 40%–55% decrease in the aleatory standard deviation compared to the reference ergodic GMMs. This large reduction in the aleatory standard deviation combined with the change in the median given by the nonergodic terms can exert a significant impact on the computed seismic hazard for the Japan region.