The Microzonation of Seismic Design Earthquake for Taipei Basin

The Microzonation of Seismic Design Earthquake for Taipei Basin

Taipei City is the capital of Taiwan and is geographically located on a sediment-filled basin. The city has experienced several damaging earthquakes in which the most recent event occurred on March 31, 2002. Obviously, the earthquake located more than 80-100 km away, it still caused severe damages in the Taipei Basin due to the site or basin effect. The essential way to mitigate the earthquake hazard is to refine the current seismic design code by a more a proper definition of seismic demands for different site conditions so that the undesired damage of structures due to earthquake excitations can be efficiently prevented. The Central Weather Bureau has installed a very dense ground-motion array in the Taipei Basin. The earthquake data collected in the last decades was used to investigate the local site effects on the ground shaking in the Taipei Basin. Finally, performing the probabilistic seismic hazard analyses with the proposed site amplification factors, the more proper microzonation of the Taipei basin is proposed for the current seismic design code.