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THE 2023 UPDATE TO THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL SEISMIC HAZARD ASSESSMENT (NSHA23) - PHILOSOPHY AND MODEL CHANGES

<div>The Australian National Seismic Hazard Assessment (NSHA) was updated in 2023 to coincide with the revision of the Australian Standard for the structural design actions for earthquake (AS1170.4). This updates the 2018 NSHA (NSHA18), which applied globally accepted, best-practice probabilistic approaches and yielded considerably lower hazard estimates at the 1/500 annual exceedance probability relative to previous national assessments and the AS1170.4–2007 seismic design values. Whilst the science underpinning the NSHA18 has withstood on-going peer review and critique, Geoscience Australia has reflected on this model and has advocated for adjustments to modelling choices where warranted. The use of structured expert elicitation was a major advance in the development of the NSHA18 and promoted ownership of the model amongst the Australian seismological community. However, some consequences of the modelling choices made during that process were not fully appreciated at the time. The 2023 NSHA (NSHA23) was intended to be a modest update to the 2018 model and again is characterised through structured expert elicitation. However, there are some key changes to the earthquake catalogue, which include: 1) the inclusion of events from mid-2017 through to the end of 2022; 2) the recalculation of local magnitudes for recent events (2010 onwards) to resolve recently discovered inconsistent observatory practice by different Australian monitoring agencies and errors with station metadata, and; 3) the subsequent revision of local magnitude to moment magnitude conversions. All seismic source models in the updated NSHA23 that rely on the updated earthquake catalogue (pre-instrumental and instrumental) are updated to reflect these changes. Incremental updates to the fault-source model and changes to the relative weights between different source-model class types have also been implemented. Another significant advance is the augmentation of the Australian Ground-Motion Database with new and legacy data. High-quality data acquired from Australian earthquakes since 2018 were used to enable more informed choices for the ground-motion characterisation model. In summary, the 2023 updates to the instrumented earthquake catalogue have led to reduced earthquake rates and seismic hazard. This change is counteracted using an updated suite of ground-motion models. Adjustments to weights in the source characterisation model yield spatially variable changes in hazard, most commonly leading to modest increases in hazard.


Presented at the 2024 18th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering, Milan, Italy

Simple

Identification info

Date (Creation)
2023-10-20T20:00:00
Date (Publication)
2025-02-18T06:09:50
Citation identifier
Geoscience Australia Persistent Identifier/https://pid.geoscience.gov.au/dataset/ga/148987

Cited responsible party
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details
Publisher

Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)

Voice
Author

Allen, T.

Internal Contact
Author

Griffin, J.

Internal Contact
Author

Clarke, J.

Internal Contact
Author

Cummins, P.

Internal Contact
Author

Ghasemi, H.

Internal Contact
Author

Ebrahimi, R.

External Contact
Author

Martin, S.

Internal Contact
Name

18th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering (WCEE 2024) 30 June - 5 July 2024 Milan, Italy

Purpose

2024 World Conference on Earthquake Engineering paper

Status
Completed
Point of contact
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details
Resource provider

Place and Communities Division

External Contact
Point of contact

Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)

Voice
Point of contact

Allen, T.

Internal Contact
Spatial representation type
Topic category
  • Geoscientific information

Extent

N
S
E
W


Maintenance and update frequency
Not planned

Resource format

Title

Product data repository: Various Formats

Website

Data Store directory containing the digital product files

Data Store directory containing one or more files, possibly in a variety of formats, accessible to Geoscience Australia staff only for internal purposes

Project
  • seismic hazard

Project
  • ground motion model

Project
  • earthquake catalogue

Keywords
  • seismic hazard

Keywords
  • ground motion model

Keywords
  • earthquake catalogue

theme.ANZRC Fields of Research.rdf
  • Seismology and seismic exploration

Keywords
  • Published_External

Resource constraints

Title

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence

Alternate title

CC-BY

Edition

4.0

Website

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Addressee
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details
User

Any

Use constraints
License
Use constraints
Other restrictions
Other constraints

© Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia) 2024

Resource constraints

Title

Australian Government Security Classification System

Edition date
2018-11-01T00:00:00
Website

https://www.protectivesecurity.gov.au/Pages/default.aspx

Classification
Unclassified
Classification system

Australian Government Security Classification System

Associated resource

Association Type
Had derivation
Title

The 2023 National Seismic Hazard Assessment for Australia. Model Overview

Citation identifier
148969

Citation identifier
86d9ffcf-8bbf-4aad-b6c4-70fcae2be457

Website

http://pid.geoscience.gov.au/dataset/ga/148969

Link to eCat metadata record landing page

Language
English
Character encoding
UTF8

Distribution Information

Distributor contact
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details
Distributor

Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)

Voice facsimile
OnLine resource

Link to Conference Page

Link to Conference Page

Distribution format
OnLine resource

Link to Paper

Link to Paper

Distribution format

Resource lineage

Statement

<div>Summary of GA Record "The 2023 National Seismic Hazard Assessment for Australia: Hazard Design Factors Proposed for the Update to the Australian Standard AS 1170.4" (eCat 148969)</div>

Metadata constraints

Title

Australian Government Security Classification System

Edition date
2018-11-01T00:00:00
Website

https://www.protectivesecurity.gov.au/Pages/default.aspx

Classification
Unclassified

Metadata

Metadata identifier
urn:uuid/51c79b0e-7063-45f1-9ed1-11e610652563

Title

GeoNetwork UUID

Language
English
Character encoding
UTF8
Contact
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details
Point of contact

Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)

Voice
Point of contact

Allen, T.

Internal Contact

Type of resource

Resource scope
Document
Name

Journal Article / Conference Paper

Alternative metadata reference

Title

Geoscience Australia - short identifier for metadata record with

uuid

Citation identifier
eCatId/148987

Metadata linkage

https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/51c79b0e-7063-45f1-9ed1-11e610652563

Date info (Creation)
2025-02-18T05:59:27
Date info (Revision)
2025-02-18T05:59:27

Metadata standard

Title

AU/NZS ISO 19115-1:2014

Metadata standard

Title

ISO 19115-1:2014

Metadata standard

Title

ISO 19115-3

Title

Geoscience Australia Community Metadata Profile of ISO 19115-1:2014

Edition

Version 2.0, September 2018

Citation identifier
http://pid.geoscience.gov.au/dataset/ga/122551

 
 

Spatial extent

N
S
E
W


Keywords

earthquake catalogue ground motion model seismic hazard
theme.ANZRC Fields of Research.rdf
Seismology and seismic exploration

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