PEER has just published Report No. 2015/04 titled “NGA-East: Median Ground-Motion Models for the Central and Eastern North America Region” as a new addition to the PEER Report Series.
Abstract:
This report documents recent ground motion models (GMMs) developed as part of the Next Generation Attenuation for Central and Eastern North America (CENA) project (NGA-East). NGA-East is a multi-disciplinary research project coordinated by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) that involves a large number of participating junior and senior researchers, practitioners, and end-users. Various organizations have provided technical input to the project from academia, industry, and government agencies. The objective of NGA-East is to develop a new ground motion characterization (GMC) model for the Central and Eastern North America (CENA) region. The tectonic region of interest reaches across into Canada; thus, the term CENA instead of CEUS is used. The GMC consists in a set of new models (GMMs, a.k.a. GMPEs) for median, ground motions a set of standard deviation models, and their associated weights in the logic-trees, for use in probabilistic seismic hazard analyses (PSHA).
The current report documents the development of new median candidate GMMs. Models for standard deviations of ground motions are developed through a separate set of tasks within NGA-East and are published separately.
The GMMs have been developed using various tasks previously completed in NGA-East, notably the path regionalization, finite-fault simulations, and database development tasks. This report consists of eleven chapters. Each chapter has its own GMM developer team and may include multiple new GMMs. In all, a total of 20 GMMs are described in this report, covering a range of alternative approaches for modeling ground motions, building on empirical relations for CENA and WNA, using recorded ground motions and collected intensity data, and incorporating point-source and finite-fault simulations.