Ground motion prediction equation for the average horizontal component of PGA, PGV, and 5% damped acceleration response spectra at periods ranging from 0.033 to 8.0s in southwest China

In this paper, we collect and process free-field strong motion recordings from 70 earthquakes for 4.2 ≤ MW ≤ 7.9 at 0 < Rrup < 300 km between 2008 and 2018 in the active tectonic regions of southwest China, and then establish a dataset containing 1324 average horizontal ground motion (ROTD50) and corresponding metadata such as parameters of the earthquake source, distance, and site. A new ground motion prediction equation (GMPE) for the average horizontal component of peak ground acceleration (PGA), peak ground velocity (PGV), and 5% damped acceleration response spectra at periods ranging from 0.033 to 8.0 s (SA (T = 0.033–8.0 s)) is introduced. This GMPE considers multiple influencing factors such as magnitude and distance saturation effect, geometric attenuation, style-of-faulting, hanging-wall effect, linear/nonlinear site response, and anelastic attenuation. The residual evaluation and median ground motion are presented. The predicted ground motions using the new GMPE are compared with predictions from the GMPE in western China and five NGA-West2 GMPEs, and the observed ground motions of strong earthquakes which occurred in southwest China. The results show that the proposed GMPE can better reflect the influence of the earthquake source characteristic, propagation media, site effect on the ground motion attenuation characteristic in southwest China, and works well versus independent strong motion data of earthquakes in southwest China, and well reflects the general feature of ground motions for the Wenchuan and Lushan earthquakes that is rich at short-period and weak at long-period. The new GMPE shows outstanding performance estimating the horizontal ground motion of the earthquakes in southwest China for MW 4.2–7.9 (related to style-of-faulting) and Rrup = 10–200 km, at sites with VS30 = 140–1130 m/s.