An Earthquake Catalogue (2200 B.C. to 2013) for Seismotectonic and Seismic Hazard Assessment Studies in Egypt

Updated Probabilistic Seismic‐Hazard Values for Egypt

“…to 2013 has been compiled (Sawires et al, 2015(Sawires et al, , 2016a. Data were obtained from different locations (e.g., Maamoun et al, 1984;Riad and Meyers, 1985;Kebeasy, 1990;Badawy and Horváth, 1999;Riad et al, 2004), regional, and international sources (e.g., Ambraseys et al, 1994;Engdahl et al, 1998;International Seismological Center, 2011), as well as the Egyptian National Seismic Network Bulletins (1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010).…”

“…Earthquake magnitudes were reported in different sizes (macroseismic intensity I max , and body wave m b , surface wave M s , moment M w , duration m D , and local magnitudes M L ), and come from a variety of sources. For establishing a unified magnitude scale, some relationships were specifically developed and considered to convert the reported sizes to the M w scale (Sawires et al, 2016a).…”

“…More than 16,000 events above M w 3.0 are represented in the final catalog of main earthquakes. Concerning the completeness of the unified catalog, from Figure 2 some characteristics can be seen of its Poissonian behavior (Sawires et al, 2016a). In this appraisal, the fact that earthquakes follow a Poisson distribution in time has been considered to minimize any spatial bias of the earthquake occurrence process, as it usually is in most seismic-hazard assessments, both in zoning and nonzoning methods.…”

“…Therefore, it has been checked that to use this relationship in terms of M w does not include any additional error. Taking into account the developed relationship between M s and M w magnitudes to unify the magnitudes of the earthquake catalog, the differences among these two magnitude values, in the range M s 5.5-8.5, do not exceed 0.1 (Sawires et al, 2016a).…”

“…In addition, many historical events happened and were reported to be located inside the Egyptian territory (Table 2). Although the 22 November 1995 M w 7.2 Gulf of Aqaba earthquake was the strongest Table 1 Largest Instrumental Events (Magnitudes above M w 5.0) in Egypt in the Last 50 Years (after Sawires et al, 2016a) 2 R. Sawires, J. A. Peláez, R. E. Fat-Helbary, and H. A. Ibrahim one among the instrumental events, it was the 12 October 1992 M s 5.9 event that left the deepest imprints on everyone, not only because it resulted in hundreds of injuries and fatalities, but also because it incurred a huge economic loss in damages, making it one of the costliest natural disasters in Egypt (Abou Elenean et al, 2010).…”