First prize in EERI's First Annual Graphics Competition was awarded to the Carnegie Mellon University team at the 2008 Annual Meeting

Watch Shakeout: Numerical Simulations of an Mw 7.8 Earthquake in Southern California 

The results of the First EERI Annual Graphics Competition were announced during EERI’s Annual Meeting by Arzhang Alimoradi, chair of the Younger Members Committee, which organized the competition. First place went to a three-member team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, consisting of Ph.D. students Ricardo Taborda and Leonardo Ramirez-Guzman and Professor Jacobo Bielak. Taborda attended the meeting to receive the award on behalf of his team. Second and third place finishers were EERI members Randolph Langenbach of Conservationtech Consulting in Oakland, California, and David Wald of the U.S. Geological Survey in Lakewood, Colorado, respectively.

The first-place project consists of graphic animations of wave propagation phenomena generated by a scenario Mw 7.8 earthquake on the San Andreas fault in the Greater Los Angeles Basin. The results of the simulation, clearly visible in the animation, suggest a direct correlation between the amplification levels and the local soil and basin profiles. Three-dimensional simulations of earthquakes have led to a deeper understanding of wave propagation and site effects in urban regions. This simulation was performed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center using Hercules software developed by the Quake Group at Carnegie Mellon University. The team verified their results by comparing synthetic seismograms computed by others for similar scenario earthquakes. Thanks to a recently awarded grant from NSF, the team will include nonlinear soil characteristics and structures (site-city effects) in future simulations.

Other entrants

2^nd Place — “Sequences, The Earthquake Destruction of Arg-e Bam”
Randolph Langenbach

3^rd Place — “Java.onePAGER: US Geological Survey's Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response (PAGER) summary system”
Paul Earle, David Wald, Kuo-wan Line, Jeremy fee and Mike Hearne (USGS, Golden CO, USA)

“DYFI.East vs West”
David Wald and Gail Atkinson (USGS, Golden CO and University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada)

“EUS.Vs30”
David Wald and Trevor Allen (USGS, Golden CO, USA)

EERI extends thanks to the panel of judges: Christopher Arnold, Armen Der Kiureghian, Marshall Lew, Farzad Naeim, Bob Reitherman, and Susan Tubbesing. Acceptable categories of submissions were drawings and paintings, graphs and diagrams, symbols and mathematics, maps, photographs, engineering drawings, computer graphics, web graphics, and moving pictures.