Publications

This paper studies the impacts of sea-level rise on liquefaction triggering and severity around the San Francisco Bay Area, California, for the M 7.0 “HayWired” earthquake scenario along the Hayward fault. This work emerged from stakeholder engagement for the US Geological Survey releases of the HayWired earthquake scenario and the Coastal Storm Modeling System projects, in which local planners an

We identify aspects of finite‐source parameterization that strongly affect the accuracy of estimated ground motion for earthquake early warning (EEW). EEW systems aim to alert users to impending shaking before it reaches them. The U.S. West Coast EEW system, ShakeAlert, currently uses two algorithms based on seismic data to characterize the earthquake’s location, magnitude, and origin time, treati

Seismic attenuation is generally greater in the western United States (WUS) than the central and eastern United States (CEUS), but the nature of this transition or location of this boundary is poorly constrained. We conduct crustal seismic (Lg) attenuation tomography across a region that stretches from the CEUS across the Rocky Mountains to the Basin and Range using a total of 115,870 amplitude me

During rock friction experiments at large displacement, room temperature and humidity, and following a hold test, the fracture energy increases approximately as the square of the logarithm of hold duration. While it's been long known that failure strength increases with log hold time, here the slip weakening distance, dh, also increases. The weakening distance increase is large, hundreds of percen

We evaluate the seismic performance of modern seismically designed wood light-frame (WLF) buildings, considering regional seismic hazard characteristics that influence ground motion duration and frequency content and, thus, seismic risk. Results show that WLF building response correlates strongly with ground motion spectral shape but weakly with duration. Due to the flatter spectral shape of groun

As seismologists continue to place more stringent demands on data quality, accurately described metadata are becoming increasingly important. In order to better constrain the orientation and sensitivities of seismometers deployed in U.S. Geological Survey networks, the Albuquerque Seismological Laboratory (ASL) has recently begun identifying true north with a fiber optic gyroscope (FOG) and has de

Clock accuracy is a basic parameter of any seismic station and has become increasingly important for seismology as the community seeks to refine structures and dynamic processes of the Earth. In this study, we measure the arrival time differences of moderate repeating earthquakes with magnitude 5.0–5.9 in the time range of 1991–2017 at the same seismic stations by cross‐correlating their highly si

The HayWired earthquake scenario, led by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), anticipates the impacts of a hypothetical moment magnitude 7.0 earthquake on the Hayward Fault. The fault runs along the east side of California’s San Francisco Bay and is among the most active and dangerous in the United States, passing through a densely urbanized and interconnected region. A scientifically realistic scen

Estimating the detection threshold of a seismic network (the minimum magnitude earthquake that can be reliably located) is a critical part of network design and can drive network maintenance efforts. The ability of a station to detect an earthquake is often estimated by assuming the spectral amplitude for an earthquake of a given size, assuming an attenuation relationship, and comparing the predic

We conducted triaxial friction tests at hydrothermal conditions (25°C–350°C) on gouges of peridotite and its principal mineral constituents olivine and orthopyroxene. Pore-fluid chemistry was varied by the use of peridotite, granite, or quartzite driving blocks (representing wall rock) housing the gouge layer. Samples sheared at slow rates initially strengthen to a peak value, and then weaken towa

The main objective of this study is to develop physics‐based constraints on the spatiotemporal variation of the slip‐rate function using a simplified dynamic rupture model. First, we performed dynamic rupture modeling of the 2019 Mw 7.1 Ridgecrest, California, earthquake, to analyze the effects of depth‐dependent stress and material friction on slip rate. Then, we used our modeling results to guid

Since their inception in the 1980s, simplified procedures for the analysis of liquefaction hazards have typically characterized seismic loading using a combination of peak ground acceleration and earthquake magnitude. However, more recent studies suggest that certain evolutionary intensity measures (IMs) such as Arias intensity or cumulative absolute velocity may be more efficient and sufficient p