Better understanding of the seismic ground motion characteristics literally leads to more
accurate early-stage damage assessments and seismic risk mitigation. In Iceland,
regardless of complex geological features that may exist within depth, the rock site
characterization is largely common for earthquake engineering applications due to the
easily exposed older bedrock and more recent volcanic lava-rock. The corresponding site
amplification is expected to be low and uniform in these regions; however, recent ground …

Earthquake recordings on two small-aperture (covering∼ 1.2 km 2 each) strong-motion
arrays in Iceland (ICEARRAY I and II) exhibit considerable variations in the spatial
distribution of ground-motion amplitudes. To better understand this spatial variability, we use
a Bayesian Hierarchical Model (BHM) that incorporates ground motions models (GMMs) for
peak ground accelerations (PGA) developed from ground motion databases recorded by the
two arrays, respectively. The posterior distributions of the model parameters are then …