Comprehensive Comparison among the Campbell–Bozorgnia NGA‐West2 GMPE and Three GMPEs from Europe and the Middle East

Abstract

Campbell and Bozorgnia (2006) compared their newly developed Next Generation Attenuation‐West1 project (NGA‐West1) ground‐motion prediction equation (GMPE) with a contemporary GMPE developed for the active crustal region of Europe and the Middle East. Based on that comparison, they proposed that their GMPE could be used to estimate ground motions in these regions. Later studies by a number of investigators confirmed this proposal for several of the NGA GMPEs using available pan‐European GMPEs and European strong‐motion data. In this study, I performed a detailed comparison of the NGA‐West2 GMPE of Campbell and Bozorgnia (2014) with three newly developed GMPEs for the pan‐European region. The comparisons were performed in terms of median predictions, standard deviations, and residual analyses with respect to the NGA‐West2 database used to develop the NGA‐West2 GMPE. These comparisons indicate that the scaling characteristics of all four GMPEs are generally comparable in terms of attenuation and linear site response but differ in terms of scaling with magnitude, source depth, style of faulting, and nonlinear site effects. These differences are not scientifically significant and are not found to be statistically significant for the pan‐European events of similar magnitude in the NGA‐West2 database. As a result, I propose that the GMPE of Campbell and Bozorgnia (2014) can be used to estimate ground motions from moderate‐to‐large‐magnitude earthquakes in pan‐Europe as a means of more reliably extending these estimates to large magnitudes and short distances of greater engineering interest and to include ground‐motion scaling features that are not currently included in pan‐European GMPEs.