TITLE:
Seismic Hazard Assessment for Tabuk City, NW Saudi Arabia
AUTHORS:
Ziyad I. Al-Besher
KEYWORDS:
Tabuk City; Seismicity; Seismic Hazard Assessment; Response Spectra
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geoscience and Environment Protection,
Vol.1 No.3,
November
29,
2013
ABSTRACT: Tabuk city is located
within the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba active tectonic environment where it has
ex- perienced
considerable earthquakes in the historical and instrumental period. Recently,
Tabuk city is ex- pected
to become one of the future economic communities in Saudi Arabia. Accordingly,
assessment of seismic hazard of Tabuk city plays an important role to minimize
earthquake damage and to anticipate the future safe development for the
strategic projects. For this purposes, earthquake data were collected from
local and regional data centers to construct earthquake catalogue. The
earthquake source zones that affect Tabuk city, maximum magnitude and closest
distance have been identified. The stochastic approach has been applied through
this study for seismic hazard assessment in terms of peak ground acceleration
and the response spectra. The results illustrated that, the maximum peak ground
acceleration resulted from Tabuk source zone with moment magnitude (Mw)
of 7.5. The calculated peak ground acceleration of218 cm/sec2 at distance of10 KmforTabukCityat the bedrock. The response spectra of Pseudo-Spectral Acceleration (PSA) have
been calculated at 5% of the critical damping with a value of470 cm/sec2 at10 Kmdistance.
The results of the present study are highly recommended to improve Saudi
Building Code (SBC) for earthquake resistant design in Tabuk city.