Preface of special issue: A new generation of ground-motion models for Europe and the Middle East

摘要

The past decade has seen great advances in the understanding of how strong ground motions scale with various independent (source, path and site) parameters and increased sophistication in the modelling of these effects in ground-motion prediction equations (GMPEs). In parallel there has been considerable progress made in modelling and quantifying the various components of aleatory variability (e.g. Al Atik et al. 2010) and uncertainty (e.g. Douglas 2010) in GMPEs. The number of GMPEs derived continues to grow rapidly; according to the compendium of Douglas (2011)more than 15 new models are currently published every year. These developments led Bommer et al. (2010) to recommend criteria for the selection of GMPEs to retain only those models for consideration that could be thought of as representing the state of the art. They also suggest that these criteria could be used as a quality assurance step to guide publication of new GMPEs.