Strong ground-motion relations for Mexican interplate earthquakes

Abstract

We derive strong ground-motion relations for horizontal components of pseudo-acceleration response spectra from Mexican interplate earthquakes at rock sites (NEHRP B class) in the forearc region. The functional form is obtained from the analytical solution of a circular finite-source model. For the regression analysis we use a recently proposed multivariate Bayesian technique. The resulting model has similar accuracy as those models derived from regional and worldwide subduction-zone databases. However, there are significant differences in the estimations computed from our model and other models. First, our results reveal that attenuation in Mexico tends to be stronger than that of worldwide relations, especially for large events. Second, our model predicts ground motions for large earthquakes at close distances to the source that are considerably larger than the estimations of global models. Lack of data in this range makes it difficult to identify the most appropriate model for this scenario. Nevertheless, according to the available data at the city of Acapulco, our model seems to estimate seismic hazard more adequately than the other models. These new relations may be useful in computing seismic hazard for the Mexican forearc region, where no similar equations had been yet proposed.