Strong ground motion simulation of the 27 May 2006 Yogyakarta earthquake using Empirical Green’s Function

Abstract

On May 27, 2006, 05:54 am local time, a moderate crustal earthquake of magnitude Mw 6,3 struck the Yogyakarta province, especially in the Bantul regency in the south part of the province. The earthquake damaged or destroyed more than 400,000 houses and buildings and caused more than 5,700 people killed. Several earthquake stations recorded the ground vibration caused by the mainshock very well, except at the stations closest to the earthquake source, namely YOGI in Gamping, West of Yogyakarta, which experienced saturation due to significant vibration. Therefore, information about the maximum ground acceleration near the source is yet not known. We model the ground vibrations near the earthquake source using a stochastic Green’s Function approach to obtain information about the ground motions’ maximum amplitude. The earthquake source parameters we referred to is the moment tensor solution from the Harvard Moment Tensor. The calculations show that the amplitude is consistent with observations recorded at the BJI Banjarnegara (0.04g) and YOGI Yogyakarta (0.3g).