A Note on the Earthquake Double Counting
As a result of active geological investigation of faults in Korea, many Quaternary faults have been identified and some of them were judged to have potential to generate earthquakes. Those faults need to be considered as additional seismic sources in the seismic hazard analysis. When a fault is introduced as a new source, the earthquakes generated by the fault should be removed from the area sources that include any part of the fault, to avoid double counting. In practice, however, double counting cannot completely be avoided as the complete separation of the fault-generated earthquakes from the area sources is impossible due to uncertainties related to the earthquake location, subsurface structures of faults, etc. When a new fault source is introduced, the only constraint is the invariance of earthquake frequency. The maximum earthquake and the Richter-b value should also be subject to change, but there are no competent approaches to estimate the change due to incomplete separation of earthquakes. To gain insight into the effect of a new fault source, an example calculation of the seismic hazard were carried out. The example calculation shows that addition of a new fault source centers seismic hazard around the fault source.