Seismic hazard assessment for Guatemala City

Guatemala is one of the Central American countries that for some years now have been participating in a regional program for natural hazard assessment and disaster reduction, funded by the Nordic countries and coordinated by a regional institution (CEPREDENAC). Recent work related to seismic hazard has included the standardization, reporting and processing of seismicity data across the borders, followed by regional hazard modeling. The work presented here for Guatemala City represents a step from a regional to a more local level, based on reevaluation of historical seismicity, geological data related to active faults, and attenuation relations recently derived from analysis of strong motion records from the region. The site specific hazard calculations indicate that expected values of peak ground acceleration are ranging from less than 2 to more than 6 m s^–2, corresponding to annual exceedence probabilities ranging from 0.1 to 0.001, respectively.

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