Title: NDSHA: robust and reliable seismic hazard assessment,
Abstract: The Neo-Deterministic Seismic Hazard Assessment (NDSHA) method reliably and
realistically simulates the suite of earthquake ground motions that may impact
civil populations as well as their heritage buildings. The modeling technique
is developed from comprehensive physical knowledge of the seismic source
process, the propagation of earthquake waves and their combined interactions
with site effects. NDSHA effectively accounts for the tensor nature of
earthquake ground motions formally described as the tensor product of the
earthquake source functions and the Green Functions of the pathway. NDSHA uses
all available information about the space distribution of large magnitude
earthquake, including Maximum Credible Earthquake (MCE) and geological and
geophysical data. It does not rely on scalar empirical ground motion
attenuation models, as these are often both weakly constrained by available
observations and unable to account for the tensor nature of earthquake ground
motion. Standard NDSHA provides robust and safely conservative hazard estimates
for engineering design and mitigation decision strategies without requiring
(often faulty) assumptions about the probabilistic risk analysis model of
earthquake occurrence. If specific applications may benefit from temporal
information the definition of the Gutenberg-Richter (GR) relation is performed
according to the multi-scale seismicity model and occurrence rate is associated
to each modeled source. Observations from recent destructive earthquakes in
Italy and Nepal have confirmed the validity of NDSHA approach and application,
and suggest that more widespread application of NDSHA will enhance earthquake
safety and resilience of civil populations in all earthquake-prone regions,
especially in tectonically active areas where the historic earthquake record is
too short.