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Implementation of the SSHAC Guidelines for Level 3 and 4 PSHAs - Experience gained from actual applications

In April 1997, after four years of deliberations, the Senior Seismic Hazard Analysis Committee released its report 'Recommendations for Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis: Guidance on Uncertainty and Use of Experts' through the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission as NUREG/CR-6372, hereafter SSHAC (1997). Known informally ever since as the 'SSHAC Guidelines', SSHAC (1997) addresses why and how mu
Authors
Thomas C. Hanks, Norm A. Abrahamson, David M. Boore, Kevin J. Coppersmith, Nichole E. Knepprath

Data files for ground-motion simulations of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and scenario earthquakes on the Northern San Andreas Fault

This data set contains results from ground-motion simulations of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, seven hypothetical earthquakes on the northern San Andreas Fault, and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The bulk of the data consists of synthetic velocity time-histories. Peak ground velocity on a 1/60th degree grid and geodetic displacements from the simulations are also included. Details of the gr
Authors
Brad T. Aagaard, Michael Barall, Thomas M. Brocher, David Dolenc, Douglas Dreger, Robert W. Graves, Stephen Harmsen, Stephen H. Hartzell, Shawn Larsen, Kathleen McCandless, Stefan Nilsson, N. Anders Petersson, Arthur Rodgers, Bjorn Sjogreen, Mary Lou Zoback

Illuminating Northern California’s Active Faults

Newly acquired light detection and ranging (lidar) topographic data provide a powerful community resource for the study of landforms associated with the plate boundary faults of northern California (Figure 1). In the spring of 2007, GeoEarthScope, a component of the EarthScope Facility construction project funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, acquired approximately 2000 square kilometer
Authors
Carol S. Prentice, Christopher J. Crosby, Caroline S. Whitehill, J. Ramon Arrowsmith, Kevin P. Furlong, David A. Philips

Addressing geohazards through ocean drilling

No abstract available. 
Authors
J.K. Morgan, Eli Silver, Angelo Camerlenghi, Brandon Dugan, Stephen H. Kirby, Craig Shipp, Kiyoshi Suyehiro

BSSA: Worth thinking about

The Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA) is a powerful community project that has helped us share the information necessary to keep our field moving forward since 1911. In some ways, BSSA is much like it has always been, and each issue provides us with a collection of research that has been improved by the peer review process and copyedited, typeset, and printed to make it easil
Authors
Andrew J. Michael

Preparing a population for an earthquake like Chi-Chi: The Great Southern California ShakeOut

The Great Southern California ShakeOut was a week of special events featuring the largest earthquake drill in United States history. On November 13, 2008, over 5 million southern Californians pretended that a magnitude-7.8 earthquake had occurred and practiced actions that could reduce its impact on their lives. The primary message of the ShakeOut is that what we do now, before a big earthquake, w
Authors
Lucile M. Jones

The puzzle of the 1996 Bárdarbunga, Iceland, earthquake: no volumetric component in the source mechanism

A volcanic earthquake with Mw 5.6 occurred beneath the Bárdarbunga caldera in Iceland on 29 September 1996. This earthquake is one of a decade-long sequence of  events at Bárdarbunga with non-double-couple mechanisms in the Global Centroid Moment Tensor catalog. Fortunately, it was recorded well by the regional-scale Iceland Hotspot Project seismic experiment. We investigated the event with a comp
Authors
Hrvoje Tkalcic, Douglas S. Dreger, Gillian R. Foulger, Bruce R. Julian

A guide to differences between stochastic point-source and stochastic finite-fault simulations

Why do stochastic point-source and finite-fault simulation models not agree on the predicted ground motions for moderate earthquakes at large distances? This question was posed by Ken Campbell, who attempted to reproduce the Atkinson and Boore (2006) ground-motion prediction equations for eastern North America using the stochastic point-source program SMSIM (Boore, 2005) in place of the finite-sou
Authors
G. M. Atkinson, K. Assatourians, D. M. Boore, K. Campbell, D. Motazedian

Stratigraphic controls on saltwater intrusion in the Dominguez Gap area of coastal Los Angeles

The Los Angeles Basin is a densely populated coastal area that significantly depends on groundwater. A part of this groundwater supply is at risk from saltwater intrusion—the impetus for this study. High-resolution seismic-reflection data collected from the Los Angeles–Long Beach Harbor Complex have been combined with borehole geophysical and descriptive geological data from four nearby ~400-m-dee
Authors
Brian D. Edwards, Kenneth D. Ehman, Daniel J. Ponti, Eric G. Reichard, John Tinsley, Robert J. Rosenbauer, Michael T. Land

A search in strainmeter data for slow slip associated with triggered and ambient tremor near Parkfield, California

We test the hypothesis that, as in subduction zones, slow slip facilitates triggered and ambient tremor in the transform boundary setting of California. Our study builds on the study of Peng et al. (2009) of triggered and ambient tremor near Parkfield, California during time intervals surrounding 31, potentially triggering, M ≥ 7.5 teleseismic earthquakes; waves from 10 of these triggered tremor a
Authors
E.F. Smith, J. Gomberg