On the variability of strong ground motions recorded from Vrancea earthquakes

The main focus of this paper is the analysis of the different components of the variability for strong ground motions recorded from earthquakes produced by the Vrancea subcrustal seismic source. The analysis is performed for two ground motion prediction equations: Youngs et al. (1997) and Zhao et al. (2006), recommended within the SHARE project for the Vrancea subcrustal seismic source and which are proposed in the work of Delavaud et al. (2012) and graded best in Vacareanu et al. (2013c). The first phase of the analysis procedure consists of a grading procedure. In the second phase, the single station sigma procedure is applied for both attenuation models in order to reduce some parts of ground motion models' variability produced by the ergodic assumption. The strong ground motion database which is used throughout the study consists of over 400 accelerograms recorded from 9 Vrancea intermediate-depth seismic events. The results of the single station sigma analysis show significant reduction of the standard deviations, especially in the case of the Youngs et al. (1997) attenuation model, which is also graded better than the other selected GMPE.