24. Importance of Site-Specific Observations at Various Stages of Seismic Microzonation Practices

Seismic microzonation plays an important role in city planning and assessing seismic design parameters for buildings. Further, seismic microzonation studies are useful for seismic vulnerability and risk studies. Aligning with Government of India’s vision, more projects for infrastructural development are under execution. Seismic microzonation of important cities, which are under above projects, can be very useful at this stage. This paper discusses important observations, made at various levels in a seismic microzonation study, which can affect the analysis and the overall outcomes of such study. These include identification of seismic source, methods of declustering of earthquake (EQ) catalogue, selection of ground motions for assessing local site effect, assessment of liquefaction potential and identification of liquefiable zones. It must be mentioned here that currently numerous seismic microzonation studies are ongoing. In such cases, observations made in this paper can be very useful to enhance the accuracy of ongoing studies and to provide very useful inputs for future seismic microzonation studies.