Attenuation modeling of recent earthquakes in Turkey

This paper deals with the derivation of a consistent set of empiricalattenuation relationships for predicting free-field horizontal components ofpeak ground acceleration (PGA) and 5 percent damped pseudoacceleration response spectra (PSA) from 47 strong ground motion recordsrecorded in Turkey. The relationships for Turkey were derived in similarform to those previously developed by Boore et al. (1997) for shallowearthquakes in western North America. The used database was compiledfor earthquakes in Turkey with moment magnitudes (M_w) = 5 thatoccurred between 1976–1999, and consisted of horizontal peak groundacceleration and 5 percent damped response spectra of accelerogramsrecorded on three different site conditions classified as rock, soil and softsoil. The empirical equations for predicting strong ground motion weretypically fit to the strong motion data set by applying nonlinear regressionanalysis according to both random horizontal components and maximumhorizontal components. Comparisons of the results show that groundmotion relations for earthquakes in one region cannot be simply modifiedfor use in engineering analyses in another region. Our results, patternedafter the Boore et al. expressions and dominated by the Kocaeli andDüzce events in 1999, appear to underestimate predictions based ontheir curves for up to about 15 km. For larger distances the reverse holds.