"Progress and Controversy in Seismic Hazard Mapping"

Arthur Frankel delivers EERI's 2010 William B. Joyner Memorial Lecture 

Arthur Frankel is a Senior Scientist and Coordinator for Earthquake Effects Research with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Stationed in Seattle, Washington, he is currently the task leader for Urban Seismic Hazard Maps in the Pacific Northwest and for San Francisco Bay Area Portable Seismic Arrays for Hazard Assessment. Dr. Frankel has worked on a variety of topics in earthquake ground motion research and seismic hazard assessment. From 1993 to 2004, he was the project chief for National Seismic Hazard Mapping at the USGS. This project produces seismic hazard maps that are used in the seismic provisions of building codes and many other applications. More recently, he led the effort to make detailed urban seismic hazard maps for Seattle based on three-dimensional ground-motion simulations. Dr. Frankel has been a seismologist with the USGS since 1985. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He was a Bantrell postdoctoral fellow at CalTech from 1982 to 1983. He worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a research scientist from 1984-1985.

In the lecture he discusses three examples that illustrate how seismic hazard maps are developed and applied: the production of the 1996 national seismic hazard maps, the controversy involving the seismic hazard in the New Madrid region of the central U.S., and the construction of detailed urban seismic hazard maps for Seattle using three-dimensional ground-motion simulations. 

Dr. Frankel’s was the seventh annual lecture given in honor of Bill Joyner for his distinguished career at the U.S. Geological Survey and his abiding commitment to the exchange of information at the interface of earthquake science and earthquake engineering. The lecture was established by the Seismological Society of America (SSA) in cooperation with EERI. Frankel will give the lecture again at SSA’s April 2010 Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon. A written version will be published in Earthquake Spectra and Seismological Research Letters. For more information about the award visit www.seismosoc.org/about/joyner_fund.html .