Seismic Hazard Assessment for Tabuk City, NW Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Tabuk city is located within the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba active tectonic environment where it has experienced considerable earthquakes in the historical and instrumental period. Recently, Tabuk city is expected to become one of the future economic communities in Saudi Arabia. Accordingly, assessment of seismic hazard of Tabuk city plays an important role to minimize earthquake damage and to anticipate the future safe development for the strategic projects. For this purposes, earthquake data were collected from local and regional data centers to construct earthquake catalogue. The earthquake source zones that affect Tabuk city, maximum magnitude and closest distance have been identified. The stochastic approach has been applied through this study for seismic hazard assessment in terms of peak ground acceleration and the response spectra. The results illustrated that, the maximum peak ground acceleration resulted from Tabuk source zone with moment magnitude (M w) of 7.5. The calculated peak ground acceleration of 218 cm/sec 2 at distance of 10 Km for Tabuk City at the bedrock. The response spectra of Pseudo-Spectral Acceleration (PSA) have been calculated at 5% of the critical damping with a value of 470 cm/sec 2 at 10 Km distance. The results of the present study are highly recommended to improve Saudi Building Code (SBC) for earthquake resistant design in Tabuk city.