Earthquake hazard zoning using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and GIS techniques (Case study: central part of the Semirom city)

Natural hazards such as earthquake is as the nature disasters that have many financial and human losses every year. Today advances in science and technology, provided appropriate fields for the study and reduce these natural hazards. In this respect, the geographic information along with decision support tool used to assess the risk of earthquake. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of different factors in the creation and earthquake hazard zonation of earthquake in central part of the Semirom city. For this purpose affecting factors were binary compared using analytical method by indicating the weight of each factor as indicator for their effects in occurrence of earthquake. Accordingly, the earthquake regionalization hazard map was prepared to the use of weighed information layer and weighted coefficient of each factor. Results of this study show that the analytical hierarchy method is precise method for evaluation of earthquake potential due to the use of binary comparison affecting factors and considering numerous factors for earthquake evaluation at the same time in comparison to the other prevalent method. The results indicates that the percentage of high and very high hazard class is 49.72 percent in AHP method.