Earthquake Hazard for the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia — Contribution to the ILC/IASPEI Global Seismic Hazard Assessment Program

The cross-bordering earthquake hazard map for three Central European countries, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia (CZ-PL-SK) in the sense of the Global Seismic Hazard Assessment Program (GSHAP) was elaborated both in terms of macroseismic intensities and in terms of peak ground accelerations (PGA). A new earthquake parametric catalogue for CZ-PL-SK (Schenková et al., 1999) allows the source regions to be delineated with respect to tectonic structures. Regions for Austria and Germany were taken from the D-A-CH area with some modifications in the border zone with the Czech Republic and Poland. Regions of other surrounding countries were defined with respect to national earthquake catalogues and geologico-geophysical data of Central European countries. For each source region earthquake data were normalised to obtain a reliable annual recurrence graph and the maximum expected earthquakes. Attenuation laws were defined to allow more advanced earthquake hazard maps to be calculated by the standard probabilistic McGuire’s (1976) approach. The obtained GSHAP hazard maps for the CZ-PL-SK area were calculated for the return period of 475 years. Besides a comparison with the hazard values for the D-A-CH area (Grünthal et al., 1995, 1996; Grünthal, 1997), the map was also compared with the effective ground acceleration map for Austria (Lenhardt, 1996) and in both cases a very good coincidence was found.