Geoscience Australia, together with contributors from the wider Australian seismology community, have produced a draft National Seismic Hazard Assessment (NSHA18), recommended for inclusion in the 2018 update of Standards Australia’s Structural design actions, part 4: Earthquake actions in Australia, AS1170.4–2007 (Standards Australia, 2007). This Standard is prepared by Subcommittee BD-006-11, General Design Requirements and Loading on Structures of Standards Australia.
The provisional seismic hazard values presented in this report have been submitted to comply with Standards Australia’s public comment and publication timelines. This report provides a brief overview of provisional mean peak ground acceleration values (equivalent to the seismic hazard factor Z in AS1170.4) and the approaches used. The hazard values are calculated on rock sites (AS1170.4 Site Class Be) for a probability of exceedance of 10% in 50 years (0.0021 per annum). Continued refinement of these values will occur throughout, and in response to, the first public comment period. While only minor changes are expected, the final NSHA18 will be completed prior to Standard Australia’s planned second public comment period (likely in late 2017).
The NSHA18 update yields many important advances on its predecessors, including:
• calculation in a full probabilistic framework (e.g., Cornell, 1968) using the Global Earthquake Model Foundation’s OpenQuake-engine (Pagani et al., 2014);
• consistent expression of earthquake magnitudes in terms of moment magnitude, MW;
• inclusion of epistemic uncertainty through the use of third-party source models contributed by the Australian seismology community;
• inclusion of epistemic uncertainty on magnitude-frequency distributions;
• inclusion of a national fault-source model based on the Australian Neotectonic Features database (Clark et al., 2012; Clark et al., 2016);
• inclusion of epistemic uncertainty on fault-slip-model magnitude-frequency distributions and earthquake clustering; and
• use of modern ground-motion models.
