On 8 March 2010, an earthquake of Mw=6.1 occurred in Elazig and Kovancilar in Turkey. This event is known as the 2010 Elazig Kovancilar earthquake. It caused massive destruction in the rural areas affected and claimed lives.
We performed the empirical Green's function method to simulate the strong ground motion of this event and the largest aftershock recorded with magnitude Mw =5.5, utilizing strong ground motion data from strong motion and broadband velocity stations. We then converted these records into a uniform sampling frequency to carry out the simulation. Amplitude spectral analysis was used to find an estimation of parameters used in the empirical Green’s function method.
The focal mechanism determined by Tan et al. (2011) was used for the simulation of the mainshock and the largest aftershock. The best source model was estimated by fitting the synthetic acceleration, velocity and displacement to the observed seismograms.
The obtained size of the estimated strong ground motion generation area was calculated as 2.80 km in length by 2.00 km in width for both the mainshock and the aftershock. The rupture starting point was found to be at northeast and southwest of the estimated strong ground motion area for the mainshock and the largest aftershock, respectively. We determined the scaling parameter for the mainshock as 2 and the stress drop correction factor is 3.5. The determined scaling parameter for the largest aftershock is 2 and the stress drop correction factor is 2.5.
The above analyses suggest that the stress drop correction factor of the strong motion generation area for the mainshock is 1.4 times higher than that for the largest aftershock. The 2010 Elazig Kovancilar earthquake is characterized by shallow depth rupture with high stress drop. This fact is considered to be one of the source effects to generate severe ground motion for the damaging earthquake.