Assessing ground-motion amplitudes and attenuation for small-to-moderate induced and tectonic earthquakes in the Central and Eastern United States

In this article, we evaluate the ground-motion prediction equations (GMPEs) described by Atkinson (2015) and Shahjouei and Pezeshk (2016) with ground-motion data collected from the central and eastern United States (CEUS). The former GMPE was developed for small-to-moderate events at short hypocentral distances with application to induced earthquakes in eastern North America, using the ground-motion database developed by the Next Generation Attenuation-West2 (NGA-West2) project (Bozorgnia et al., 2014). The latter GMPE was developed for the central and eastern North America for the NGA-East project (Frankel, 2015). We compare spectral amplitudes from 46,178 ground-motion recordings at 1069 stations from 2873 earthquakes in the CEUS to the GMPEs. The ground-motion catalog is divided into potentially-induced and tectonic earthquakes using the classification scheme of Petersen et al. (2015), and their differences in geometric spreading are observed. We observe that the Atkinson (2015) GMPE is a good fit for ground motions at hypocentral distances of less than 60 km, and that the Shahjouei and Pezeshk (2016) GMPE captures the geometric spreading of ground motions at larger distances, for both induced and tectonic earthquakes.