Regional scale deterministic ground motion simulations from dynamic rupture models considering shallow crust nonlinearity and implications for tsunami generation

Ahmed Elbanna, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

Earthquakes are one of the major natural hazards that cost thousands of people’s lives and billions of dollars in economic losses annually. Earthquake hazard manifests itself in many ways including ground shaking, soil liquefaction, building damage, disruption of critical infrastructure, and occasionally in generating destructive tsunamis. Due to the limited size of recorded data from large earthquakes (of magnitude 7 and above), mechanistic simulations realizing an earthquake scenario and the ensuing wave propagation are increasingly used to give an idea of what to expect in an upcoming major earthquake.

Nonetheless, earthquake dynamic rupture simulations and regional scale wave propagation modeling to frequencies of interest to the built environment (e.g. f = 1-10 Hz) are computationally expensive problems that require access to state of the art high computing facilities. If multi-physics scenarios are required, as in simulating an earthquake induced tsunami for instance, the computational requirements grow even larger.

This project will design and run models for: (1) 3D regional scale deterministic ground motion simulations up to frequencies of 5Hz using physics based dynamic rupture models and realistic 3D crustal velocity structure and shallow crust nonlinearity and (2) 3D regional scale fault rupture models coupled with Tsunami generation inspired by the recent Palu earthquake which occurred in a geometry similar to the San Andreas fault crossing the bay area near San Francisco. It is expected that these simulations will give us unprecedented insights into the nature of high frequency generation during earthquakes and broaden our understanding for tsunami-genesis of crustal faults.