Assessing Ground-Motion Amplitudes and Attenuation for Small-to-Moderate Induced and Tectonic Earthquakes in the Central and Eastern United States

In this article, we evaluate the ground-motion prediction equa- tions (GMPEs) described by Atkinson (2015) and Shahjouei and Pezeshk (2016) with ground-motion data collected from the central and eastern United States (CEUS). The former GMPE was developed for small-to-moderate events at short hypocentral distances with application to induced earthquakes in eastern North America, using the ground-motion database developed by the Next Generation Attenuation-West2 (NGA- West2) project (Bozorgnia et al., 2014). The latter GMPE was developed for the central and eastern North America for the NGA-East project (Frankel, 2015). We compare spectral am- plitudes from 46,178 ground-motion recordings at 1069 sta- tions from 2873 earthquakes in the CEUS to the GMPEs. The ground-motion catalog is divided into potentially-induced and tectonic earthquakes using the classification scheme of Petersen et al. (2015), and their differences in geometric spreading are observed. We observe that the Atkinson (2015) GMPE is a good fit for ground motions at hypocentral distances of less than 60 km, and that the Shahjouei and Pezeshk (2016) GMPE cap- tures the geometric spreading of ground motions at larger dis- tances, for both induced and tectonic earthquakes. Electronic Supplement: Figures for residuals, peak ground accel- eration, spectral accelerations at the periods of 0.1 and 0.5 s, and peak ground velocity.