NGA‐Subduction research program

Abstract

This article summarizes the Next Generation Attenuation (NGA) Subduction (NGA‐Sub) project, a major research program to develop a database and ground motion models (GMMs) for subduction regions. A comprehensive database of subduction earthquakes recorded worldwide was developed. The database includes a total of 214,020 individual records from 1,880 subduction events, which is by far the largest database of all the NGA programs. As part of the NGA‐Sub program, four GMMs were developed. Three of them are global subduction GMMs with adjustment factors for up to seven worldwide regions: Alaska, Cascadia, Central America and Mexico, Japan, New Zealand, South America, and Taiwan. The fourth GMM is a new Japan‐specific model. The GMMs provide median predictions, and the associated aleatory variability, of RotD50 horizontal components of peak ground acceleration, peak ground velocity, and 5%‐damped pseudo‐spectral acceleration (PSA) at oscillator periods ranging from 0.01 to 10 s. Three GMMs also quantified “within‐model” epistemic uncertainty of the median prediction, which is important in regions with sparse ground motion data, such as Cascadia. In addition, a damping scaling model was developed to scale the predicted 5%‐damped PSA of horizontal components to other damping ratios ranging from 0.5% to 30%. The NGA‐Sub flatfile, which was used for the development of the NGA‐Sub GMMs, and the NGA‐Sub GMMs coded on various software platforms, have been posted for public use.