Broadband Ground-Motion Simulation for the Korean Peninsula

Jaejoon Lee, Yonghyun Chung, Kangryul Lee, & Changsoo Shin

Published August 14, 2019, SCEC Contribution #9654, 2019 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #063

We present our on-going work on developing a broadband ground motion simulation platform for the Korean Peninsula funded by Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO). The Korean Peninsula is generally considered stable with low to moderate intraplate seismic activity, and the Earthquake Damage Estimation Web-System for Electrical Substations (EDES) of KEPCO Research Institute (KEPRI), which is based on a stochastic point-source ground-motion simulation method, could have sufficiently simulated the small- to moderate-scale earthquakes occurred in Korean territory. However, the increase in seismic activity represented by the 2016 Gyungju and 2017 Pohang earthquakes brought up social concerns about the damages by the earthquakes and the possibility of large-scale earthquake on the Korean Peninsula. Therefore, the development of the broadband seismic simulation platform was started in 2018, which combines the stochastic and the deterministic approaches to include the strong (or low frequency) ground motion by solving the elastic wave equation.

The staggered-grid finite-difference solver running at high speed on the multi-GPUs has been developed for simulating the strong earthquake propagation and a pseudo-dynamic rupture generator (SongRMG) of the Southern California Earthquake Center Broadband Simulation Platform (SCEC BBP) was adopted. The strength of our platform is its high computational speed by the optimization of GPU-CPU thread parallelization and networking; the simulation is over 100 times faster than the OpenMP-MPI parallelization algorithm using the CPU server. This platform will be primarily used for computing earthquake signals at the locations of the electrical substations managed by KEPCO for various earthquake scenarios that can occur on the Korean Peninsula to predict the vulnerable locations and level of damages of the facilities. It is also expected to be effectively used as an inversion engine to deduce seismic source mechanism, as well as to reconstruct the velocity model of the Korean Peninsula.

Key Words
Broadband platform, Computational seismology

Citation
Lee, J., Chung, Y., Lee, K., & Shin, C. (2019, 08). Broadband Ground-Motion Simulation for the Korean Peninsula. Poster Presentation at 2019 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Seismology