A photograph of a sign in the Canterbury Quakes exhibition at the Canterbury Museum. The sign displays information about the 13 June 2011 earthquake.
A photograph of a sign in the Canterbury Quakes exhibition at the Canterbury Museum. The sign displays information about the 22 February 2011 earthquake.
The operation of telecommunication networks is critical during business as usual times, and becomes most vital in post-disaster scenarios, when the services are most needed for restoring other critical lifelines, due to inherent interdependencies, and for supporting emergency and relief management tasks. In spite of the recognized critical importance, the assessment of the seismic performance for the telecommunication infrastructure appears to be underrepresented in the literature. The FP6 QuakeCoRE project “Performance of the Telecommunication Network during the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence” will provide a critical contribution to bridge this gap. Thanks to an unprecedented collaboration between national and international researchers and highly experienced asset managers from Chorus, data and evidences on the physical and functional performance of the telecommunication network after the Canterbury Earthquakes 2010-2011 have been collected and collated. The data will be processed and interpreted aiming to reveal fragilities and resilience of the telecommunication networks to seismic events
This poster presents work to date on ground motion simulation validation and inversion for the Canterbury, New Zealand region. Recent developments have focused on the collection of different earthquake sources and the verification of the SPECFEM3D software package in forward and inverse simulations. SPECFEM3D is an open source software package which simulates seismic wave propagation and performs adjoint tomography based upon the spectral-element method. Figure 2: Fence diagrams of shear wave velocities highlighting the salient features of the (a) 1D Canterbury velocity model, and (b) 3D Canterbury velocity model. Figure 5: Seismic sources and strong motion stations in the South Island of New Zealand, and corresponding ray paths of observed ground motions. Figure 3: Domain used for the 19th October 2010 Mw 4.8 case study event including the location of the seismic source and strong motion stations. By understanding the predictive and inversion capabilities of SPECFEM3D, the current 3D Canterbury Velocity Model can be iteratively improved to better predict the observed ground motions. This is achieved by minimizing the misfit between observed and simulated ground motions using the built-in optimization algorithm. Figure 1 shows the Canterbury Velocity Model domain considered including the locations of small-to-moderate Mw events [3-4.5], strong motion stations, and ray paths of observed ground motions. The area covered by the ray paths essentially indicates the area of the model which will be most affected by the waveform inversion. The seismic sources used in the ground motion simulations are centroid moment tensor solutions obtained from GeoNet. All earthquake ruptures are modelled as point sources with a Gaussian source time function. The minimum Mw limit is enforced to ensure good signal-to-noise ratio and well constrained source parameters. The maximum Mw limit is enforced to ensure the point source approximation is valid and to minimize off-fault nonlinear effects.
A photograph of a sign in the Canterbury Quakes exhibition at the Canterbury Museum. The sign displays the number of aftershocks in Canterbury since the 4 September 2010 earthquake as of 9.00 am on the morning the photograph was taken. The tally was 9,787.
Photograph captioned by Fairfax, "Quake damage to farms near the quake centre at Greendale. University of Canterbury scientists at work on the hill that was created by the quake".
Photograph captioned by Fairfax, "Quake damage to farms near the quake centre at Greendale. University of Canterbury scientists at work on the hill that was created by the quake".
A photograph of the ChristChurch Cathedral cross, on display in the Canterbury Quakes exhibition at the Canterbury Museum.
A PDF copy of a publication promoting Canterbury businesses.
A PDF copy of a magazine promoting Canterbury Tennis.
Heathcote Valley school strong motion station (HVSC) consistently recorded ground motions with higher intensities than nearby stations during the 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquakes. For example, as shown in Figure 1, for the 22 February 2011 Christchurch earthquake, peak ground acceleration at HVSC reached 1.4 g (horizontal) and 2 g (vertical), the largest ever recorded in New Zealand. Strong amplification of ground motions is expected at Heathcote Valley due to: 1) the high impedance contrast at the soil-rock interface, and 2) the interference of incident and surface waves within the valley. However, both conventional empirical ground motion prediction equations (GMPE) and the physics-based large scale ground motions simulations (with empirical site response) are ineffective in predicting such amplification due to their respective inherent limitations.
Jessica Maddock has been covering the quake and its aftermath throughout the past month.
The winners parade at the Canterbury A&P Show.
The winners parade at the Canterbury A&P Show.
UC Quake Centre Industry Leaders' Meeting in NZi3.
UC Quake Centre Industry Leaders' Meeting in NZi3.
UC Quake Centre Industry Leaders' Meeting in NZi3.
UC Quake Centre Industry Leaders' Meeting in NZi3.
UC Quake Centre Industry Leaders' Meeting in NZi3.
A photograph of the ChristChurch Cathedral cross and spire, on display in the Canterbury Quakes exhibition at the Canterbury Museum.
A photograph of the ChristChurch Cathedral cross and spire, on display in the Canterbury Quakes exhibition at the Canterbury Museum.
Site of a residents' group formed to advocate and protect the rights of red-zoned home owners in the aftermath of the Canterbury earthquakes.
UC Quake Box set up in the Facilities Management yard to record people's quake stories for the Ceismic project. From Left: Kris Vavasour, Yena Wei, Andrew Dean, Liz Grant, Andrew MacFarlane.
A banner reading, 'The Big Quake, Canterbury, September 4, 2010'.
A photograph of an exhibition sign next to the ChristChurch Cathedral cross. The cross was on display in the Canterbury Quakes exhibition at the Canterbury Museum.
A photograph of an exhibition sign about a skateboard video filmed on Christchurch's damaged streets. The video was part of the Canterbury Quakes exhibition at the Canterbury Museum.
A photograph of an exhibition sign next to the ChristChurch Cathedral bell. The bell was on display in the Canterbury Quakes exhibition at the Canterbury Museum.
A photograph of 'The Snapa Crapa', a bike with a toilet for a seat. The bike was on display in the Canterbury Quakes exhibition at the Canterbury Museum.
Eleven million dollars has been donated so far to the Canterbury Earthquake Appeal. It comes as the Government announced early details of a recovery plan for people wanting money to fix their damaged homes or start rebuilding.
Saturday Morning's commentator on children's books talks about being in her old home city of Christchurch last Saturday during the earthquake.