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Modeling of Recent Seismicity, Seismic Hazard and Seismotectonic Setting at the New Administrative Capital City Area, Egypt

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Abstract

The new administrative capital city area in Egypt, planned to be constructed in the area between Cairo and Suez cities, is vulnerable to moderate and strong earthquakes, which are inevitable in the region. The moderate size recent earthquake with local magnitude 4.2 took place in the vicinity of administrative capital area on 31st of December 2018. The focal mechanism and ground motion characterization of this event using full waveform inversion and first P-wave polarity techniques are fundamentally studied. This earthquake was simulated at the new administrative capital city area to study the effect of magnitude and source to site distance on the ground motion. Moreover, the seismotectonic setting of the new administrative capital city area is well studied using other earthquakes that have occurred in and around it. Reduction of damage in the administrative capital city area from earthquake ground shaking requires modern building codes that are continuously updated to reflect the effects of ground motions on constructions. This research provides u-p‑to-date, essential and basic seismological results for use in the development and implementation of modern building codes and regulations in Egypt. The most important product, for immediate application by practitioners and policy makers in the region, is the newly developed local seismic hazard charts, which displays the ground acceleration values at different spectral periods. These charts provide the basic seismic input parameter that is considered in all modern building codes containing a-seismic design provisions. Also, artificial earthquake accelerograms were generated for use by the earthquake engineer in the nonlinear dynamic analysis of new or existing structures.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We express our deep sincere thanks, grateful and gratitude to the National Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics (NRIAG) (Helwan, Egypt) for providing the digital and waveform data needed to present this work. The authors used some programs for data analysis such as SeismoArtif (a program for generation of artificial accelerograms) [43], SAC (Seismic Analysis Code designed for the study of sequential signals, especially time series data) [41], CRISIS (a program for computing seismic hazard) [38], MT_INV (a program for moment tensor inversion) [46] and SMSIM (Fortran programs for simulating ground motions from earthquakes) [14]. The figures were made with using some programs such as GMT (Generic Mapping Tools) software [45] and Grapher (a program for generating graphs and plots) [25].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, 10002, Safat, Kuwait

    A. K. Abd el-aal

  2. National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics, 11918, Helwan, Egypt

    A. K. Abd el-aal

  3. Zagazig University, Faculty of Science, Geology Department, 44519, Zagazig, Egypt

    S. I. Mostafa

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  1. A. K. Abd el-aal
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Correspondence to S. I. Mostafa.

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Abd el-aal, A.K., Mostafa, S.I. Modeling of Recent Seismicity, Seismic Hazard and Seismotectonic Setting at the New Administrative Capital City Area, Egypt. Geotecton. 54, 383–394 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1134/S0016852120030024

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