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Comparison of polarity in Groningen data with that of other natural and induced seismicity records, and implications in hazard and risk models

  • S.I. : Induced Seismicity and Its Effects on Built Environment
  • Published:
Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Groningen gas field, which is being exploited for more than five decades, has been experiencing shallow and small magnitude earthquakes that cause limited structural damage to the building inventory in the region. These earthquakes are recorded in a relatively small area with multiple recording networks, which constitute a dense strong ground motion sensor grid, providing valuable insight into the characteristics of the motions produced by some 2500+ small faults at 3 km depth. The particularities of the Groningen soil, as well as the high seismic vulnerability of the structural inventory, render the Groningen earthquake problem complex, although the magnitudes experienced so far did not exceed 3.6ML. This paper is an attempt to compare the Groningen earthquake records to records from other induced seismicity and natural seismic events with similar characteristics in terms of magnitude, epicentral distance and depth, for identifying systematic differences in terms of component-to-component variability. In order to achieve that, a total of 1831 recording suites (i.e. couples of horizontal components) are used. 201 of these are Groningen records, 1112 are from other induced seismicity events to geothermal, waste water injection and hydraulic fracturing activities, while 517 are from natural earthquakes. The high polarity of the Groningen records, that is previously reported in the literature and represented as component-to-component variability in risk models, is the main focus of this paper. The component-to-component variability constitutes an important step when implementing ground motion models (GMMs) in risk assessment studies. In this study, in agreement with previous research, the component-to-component variances show that the Groningen induced seismicity events present stronger polarity than the other records used for comparison. The other induced seismicity recordings also show high component-to-component variances as compared to the natural events records, but the main difference is that their variances start decreasing in medium-to-long (i.e. above 0.6 s) periods while the variances steadily increase in the case of Groningen records. Furthermore, it is also observed that the component-to-component variances increase considerably when the rotated-to-max-PGA angle, explained in the paper, is used for defining the two horizontal components instead of using components as-recorded or rotated perpendicular to the station back azimuth. A modification to the component-to-component variance model of Groningen GMM v5 has also been proposed in this study for taking into account the orientation of the structural plan directions in respect to the ground motion component directions.

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Notes

  1. The highest polarity can in fact be found at BZN1 station data from 8th of January 2018 Zeerijp Earthquake when the complete KNMI database is processed. However, after carefully scrutinizing the data and with the help of Elmer Ruigrok and Bernard Dost from KNMI, it was found out that this recorder did not function properly during the earthquake, thus it has been removed from our dataset.

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Acknowledgements

The Oklahoma dataset and some of the scripts for processing that data were generously provided by the Resilience Engineering Lead at One Concern, Inc., Dr. Abhineet Gupta. The authors are grateful to his contribution. The authors would like to thank Julian Bommer for the valuable discussion he provided when an earlier version of the work was presented in the GMPE v5 workshop. The authors are grateful to Prof. Bozidar Stojadinovic and Catherine Whyte for helping to find some of the Swiss and US induced seismicity records. Bernard Dost and Elmer Ruigrok from KNMI were helpful in identifying and excluding the problematic data, while Jordi Domingo Ballesta and Janneke van Ginkel from KNMI were helpful in accessing the public KNMI data. Their help is noted with gratitude. A note of gratitude is also due to Gail Atkinson for helping to use the Alberta induced seismicity catalogue. We also gratefully acknowledge the great deal of help by Ahmet Anıl Dindar in using Python codes for processing the seismic data.

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  1. Research Centre for Built Environment NoorderRuimte, Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Zernikeplein 11, 9701 DA, Groningen, The Netherlands

    İhsan Engin Bal, Eleni Smyrou & Dimitris Dais

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  1. İhsan Engin Bal
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  2. Eleni Smyrou
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Correspondence to İhsan Engin Bal.

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Bal, İ.E., Smyrou, E. & Dais, D. Comparison of polarity in Groningen data with that of other natural and induced seismicity records, and implications in hazard and risk models. Bull Earthquake Eng 17, 4457–4474 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10518-018-0517-3

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