Updated seismic hazard assessment of Tunisia

Abstract

Modern earthquake loss models make use of earthquake catalogs relevant to the seismic hazard assessment upon seismicity and seismotectonic analysis. The main objective of this paper is to investigate a recently compiled catalog (National Institute of Meteorology or INM catalog: 412-2011) and to generate seismic hazard maps through classical probabilistic seismic hazard assessment (PSHA) and smoothed-gridded seismicity models for Tunisia. It is now established with the local earthquake bulletin that the recent seismicity of Tunisia is sparse and moderate. Therefore, efforts must be undertaken to elaborate a robust hazard analysis for risk assessment and seismic design purposes. These recommendations follow the recently published reports by the World Bank that describe the seismic risk in Tunis City as being beyond a tolerable level with an MSK intensity level of VII. Some attempts were made during the past two decades to assess the seismic hazard for Tunisia and they have mostly failed to properly investigate the historical and instrumental seismicity catalog. This limitation also exists for the key aspect of epistemic and random uncertainties impact on the final seismic hazard assessment. This study also investigates new ground motion prediction equations suitable for use in Tunisia. The methodology applied herein uses, for the first time in PSHA of Tunisia, seismicity parameters integrated in logic tree framework to capture epistemic uncertainties through three different seismic source models. It also makes use of the recently released version of OpenQuake engine; an open-source tool for seismic hazard and risk assessment developed in the framework of the Global Earthquake Model.