ShakeMap Atlas 4.0 and AtlasCat: An Archive of the Recent and the Historical Earthquake ShakeMaps, and Impacts for Global Hazard Analyses and Loss Model Calibration

Abstract

Archival earthquake studies often focus on event and source characteristics for use in earthquake catalogs, seismotectonic understanding, and ground-motion studies—many of these targeting better constraints for probabilistic seismic-hazard analyses. The ShakeMap Atlas, in contrast, focuses on spatial distribution of shaking for the historical events, providing the best constraints at all locations that experienced significant shaking for each event, facilitating analyses of human experience, damage, and induced hazards (ground failure). The aim of the Atlas is to gain a general understanding and depiction of the shaking distribution for a suite of canonical earthquakes, and, coupled with loss data for each event, to provide a basis for earthquake loss model calibration, among other uses. Although the initial motivation for developing the ShakeMap Atlas was calibrating the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response system, over time, the Atlas has proved to be a useful tool for its users, and, as such, its scope has been vastly expanded in this newest version. The fourth version of the USGS ShakeMap Atlas is an openly available compilation of over 14,000 ShakeMaps of significant global earthquakes between 1900 and 2020. This revision includes: (1) the latest version of the ShakeMap software that provides refined uncertainty estimations and improved methods to combine macroseismic observations with updated ground-motion models; (2) an updated earthquake source catalog; (3) a refined strategy to select suites of prediction and conversion equations based on a new seismotectonic regionalization scheme; and (4) expanded macroseismic intensity and ground-motion datasets. We also tabulate reported economic losses and fatalities for Atlas events where such data are openly available. These changes make the new ShakeMap Atlas a self-consistent, calibrated catalog invaluable for investigating near-source ground motions, as well as seismic hazard, scenario, risk, and loss-model development and testing.