An offshore non-ergodic ground motion model for subduction earthquakes in Japan Trench area

With the improvement of the world’s largest seafloor observation network (S-net) and the increase in the quantity and quality of records, the ergodic assumptions can be further relaxed in the modeling of offshore ground motion models (GMMs). This allows accounting for systematic and repeatable source, site, and path effects to further understand the characteristics of offshore ground motion in the Japan Trench region. We developed an offshore ergodic backbone GMM for subduction earthquakes and classified the sites into four categories using horizontal–vertical response spectral ratio to investigate site amplification. The offshore ergodic GMM is applicable for subduction earthquake scenarios with moment magnitudes ranging from 4.0 to 7.4 and rupture distances ranging from 10 to 300 km. Comparing offshore ergodic GMMs with onshore GMMs for subduction earthquakes, we found that offshore GMMs were significantly different from onshore GMMs, especially in the long-period and unburied states. Then a new offshore non-ergodic GMM was developed based on the offshore ergodic GMM. The systematic and repeatable source and site effects were captured by the spatially varying coefficients represented by Gaussian processes, while the systematic and repeatable path effects were captured by cell-specific anelastic attenuation proposed by Dawood and Rodriguez-Marek (2013), calculated with the Cohen-Sutherland computer graphics algorithm. The non-ergodic GMM revealed systematic and repeatable source, site, and path effects that were not captured by the ergodic GMM. Moreover, the non-ergodic GMM showed reduced aleatory variability and epistemic uncertainty on ground motion estimation compared to ergodic GMM. The reduction of aleatory variability and epistemic uncertainty had a significant impact on probabilistic seismic hazard analysis. Quantifications of these results are contributed to conduct reasonable seismic design and seismic risk assessment for marine engineering in offshore regions vulnerable to strong subduction earthquakes.