Keywords: seismic hazard, earthquakes, attenuation, Kuwait, peak ground acceleration, probabilistic analysis, seismic map.

The presented work is part of an ongoing research project conducted by Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, KISR, and funded by the Kuwait Foundation for Advancement of Science, KFAS, with the objective of assessing the seismic risk of residential buildings in Kuwait whose closeness to Zagros belt warrants the assessment.

The State of Kuwait is located in the northeastern part of the Arabian Peninsula at the northwestern end of the Arabian Gulf. Kuwait is located to the southwest of the Zagros belt which is capable of producing strong earthquakes of magnitudes 7.5. Local seismicity in Kuwait is characterized by several local earthquakes of magnitudes up to 5 mainly in the southern part of the Minagish oilfields.

The prime concern of the present paper is to assess the seismic hazard in the State of Kuwait. Seismic hazard assessment in areas of low to moderate seismic activity such as Kuwait poses a challenge to engineers due to the scarcity and incompleteness of seismological data required as input to seismic hazard analysis.

In the present study, historical and instrumental seismicity data in the Kuwait area and its vicinity are compiled to form the base earthquake catalogue covering the period from to 2000 and including events with magnitudes ranging between and. To fulfill the requirements of a Poisson distribution for earthquake time occurrence, accessory events such as fore and after shocks were removed from the catalogue by applying appropriate spatial and temporal filters. Seismic zones characterization was performed assuming an exponential model for magnitude distribution and a Poisson time occurrence model.

As for attenuation relationships, no specific relations have been developed for the region and due to the absence of instrumented data of peak ground accelerations, expert judgement was exercised as for the selection of a conservative attenuation formula. None of the previous studies of regional seismic hazard assessment in the Gulf area has considered the local seismicity in the State of Kuwait as defined by the local events recorded by the Kuwait National Seismic Network, KNSN, over the past seven years. Local events are accounted for in the present study.

Probabilistic seismic hazard analysis employed herein is based on Cornell's methodology . Seismic hazard computation was performed using the CRISIS99 program [1]).

The main finding of the study is an iso-acceleration map for the State of Kuwait which forms the basis for the evaluation of the seismic hazard.

1

M. Ordaz, A. Aguilar and J. Arboleda, CRISIS99: A Computer Code to Evaluate Seismic Hazard, Eng. Inst., Nat. Autonomous Univ. of Mexico, Mexico, 1999.

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