Seismic hazard assessment of the city of Khoy using deterministic and probabilistic seismic hazard analysis approaches

Construction of new cities or development of old towns in an area requires geological and geophysical (seismic) studies. The city of Khoy is one of the developing cities that have to be study. Therefore, the Deterministic and Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis (DSHA and PSHA) approaches have been used to assess seismic hazards and earthquake risk in the city. For this purpose, analyses have been carried out considering historic and instrumented earthquakes, geologic and seismotectonic parameters of the region covering a radius of 100 km with the city of Khoy in the center. Therefore, the main faults and fault zones in the study area were studied and length and distance of each fault from the center of the city of Khoy was calculated. At the next step, the Maximum Credible Earthquake (MCE) and Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA) have been measured using both DSHA and PSHA approaches and also equations presented by different researchers. DSHA Results show that the MCE and PGA values are 6.5 and 0.31g, respectively. PSHA results indicated that the MCE evaluated value is 6.1 for a 0.64 probability in a 50-years period. The period of this earthquake is 110 years and its probability will be 0.009 per a year. The occurrence probability of earthquakes with magnitude equal or greater than 7.1 is 10% and for earthquakes with magnitude equal or greater than 6.3 is 50% for the study area.