Documentation for the 2008 update of the United States National Seismic Hazard Maps

Any use of trade, product, or firm names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government. Although this report is in the public domain, permission must be secured from the individual copyright owners to reproduce any copyrighted materials contained within this report. Seismic Hazard Maps display earthquake ground motions for various probability levels across the United States and are applied in seismic provisions of building codes, insurance rate structures, risk assessments, and other public policy. This update of the maps incorporates new findings on earthquake ground shaking, faults, seismicity, and geodesy. The resulting maps are derived from seismic hazard curves calculated on a grid of sites across the United States that describe the frequency of exceeding a set of ground motions. The USGS National Seismic Hazard Mapping Project developed these maps by incorporating information on potential earthquakes and associated ground shaking obtained from interaction in science and engineering workshops involving hundreds of participants, review by several science organizations and State surveys, and advice from two expert panels. The new proba-bilistic hazard maps represent an update of the 2002 seismic hazard maps developed by Frankel and others (2002), which used the methodology developed for the 1996 version of the maps (Frankel and others, 1996). Algermissen and Perkins (1976) published the first probabilistic seismic hazard map of the United States which was updated in Algermissen and others (1990). The National Seismic Hazard Maps represent our assessment of the " best available science " in earthquake hazards estimation for the United States (maps of Alaska and Hawaii as well as further information on hazard across the United States are available on our Web site at http://earth-quake.usgs.gov/research/hazmaps/). USGS probabilistic seismic hazard maps are revised every 6 years or so to reflect newly published or thoroughly reviewed earthquake science and to keep pace with regular updates of the building code. We discussed potential changes in the national seismic hazard model and maps at a series of topical and regional USGS National Seismic Hazard Mapping Project (NSHMP) workshops and committee meetings held in 2005 and 2006 (fig. 1). Two workshops were convened in Menlo Park, Calif., to discuss ground shaking issues for the Central and Eastern United States (CEUS), led by Jack Boat-wright, and the Western United States (WUS). In addition, we conducted regional seismic hazard workshops for the Pacific Advisory Panel, was composed of seismic hazard experts and met …

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