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Abstract:
The 1400 km long North Anatolian Fault Zone in Türkiye runs through numerous densely
populated regions, including the city of Düzce that was recently hit by an Mw 6.1 earthquake
on 23 November 2022. This was the first moderate event in the region after the
devastating Mw 7.2 earthquake in 1999, which cost the lives of over 700 people.
Despite its moderate size, the earthquake caused unexpected severe damage to a significant
number of buildings, as reported by local institutions (Disaster and Emergency
Management Presidency, AFAD). It is well established that ground motions in the near
field can lead to increased damage due to near-field domain effects, such as groundmotion
pulses and directivity effects (i.e., when the site is aligned with rupture propagation).
We examine potential near-field effects using the strong ground motion database of
AFAD-Turkish Accelerometric Database and Analysis Systems. To achieve this, we first analyze
the behavior of the ground-motion intensities in terms of their spatial distribution and
observe higher peak ground velocity than expected by ground-motion models in spatially
constrained azimuthal ranges. Furthermore, we find that the majority of the near-fault
recordings contain velocity pulses that are primary concentrated on the fault-parallel component.
This outcome questions the widely accepted understanding from the previous
studies, which mainly suggested that impulsive ground motions that are associated with
directivity effects primarily occur on the fault-normal component of large-magnitude
events.
