Catastrophe risk modeling firm AIR Worldwide today announced the release of an updated U.S. earthquake model that includes additional subperils of tsunami and landslide and an enhanced seismicity module to capture impact of human activity on earthquake frequency.
AIR said the new model has updated its existing sub-perils; fire following, liquefaction, and sprinkler leakage, and added tsunami and landslide as new subperils.
The updated model boasts a seismicity module capable of capturing effects of human activity on earthquake probability; it examines the impact on rates of earthquake occurrence in central and eastern U.S. regions from wastewater injection associated with practices in oil and natural gas industries.
Dr. Jayanta Guin, chief research officer at AIR Worldwide, said; “As science and technology advance, new research provides an up-to-date view of earthquakes and related sub-perils, and how those hazards interact with our world.
“By incorporating these latest scientific findings into the updated earthquake model for the United States, AIR is offering the most comprehensive and innovative solution for managing seismic risk.”
For the first time, the earthquake model includes calculations of damage caused by countrywide earthquake-triggered landslides through combining data on slope, soil strength, water saturation, and ground shaking intensity.
Dr. Charles Kircher, principal at Charles Kircher & Associates, said AIR’s overall vulnerability assessment framework is a “reasonable approach to a very difficult problem-quantification of building damage due to earthquake ground motions for all of the many different types of buildings that exist in the United States.
“The framework is a sophisticated combination of several different state-of-the-art technologies that address regional differences and evolution of seismic codes and design practices in the assessment of building vulnerability.”
AIR’s updated model uses information from the latest National Seismic Hazard Maps from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the third Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast (UCERF3), and suites of ground motion prediction equations including the Next Generation Attenuation (NGA-West 2) research.
