Stochastic Modeling of Earthquake Scenarios in Greater Tehran

Tehran, the capital of Iran, with millions of inhabitants, has been affected several times by historical and recent earthquakes that confirm the importance of seismic hazard assessment for the area. The main objective of this article is to present a probabilistic procedure to construct time series compatible with the source-path and site reflecting the influence of different magnitude events at different distances that may occur during a specified time period. A Monte Carlo approach is used to generate numerous synthetic catalogs for the evaluation of the probabilistic seismic hazard in greater Tehran over hard rock site for a return period of 475 years. The disaggregation of the seismic hazard is carried out to identify hazard-dominating events and to associate them with one or more specific faults, rather than a given distance. The stochastic finite-fault technique based on region specific seismic parameters is used to generate time series of earthquake scenario.