Aftershock ground motion characteristics during the 2012 Varzaghan–Ahar doublet events, northwest of Iran

The characteristics of aftershocks can be quite different from those of mainshocks. However, most of the works in the past have generally focused on the aftershocks of strong earthquakes, while some moderate earthquakes can cause aftershocks with magnitudes close to the mainshocks. This paper focuses on the aftershocks characteristics of the 2012 Varzaghan–Ahar Doublet event (Mw = 6.4, 6.2), northwest of Iran. Numerous aftershocks with magnitudes 3.7–5.5 recorded by the local seismic stations provide useful data to study the spectral characteristics at various periods. The predictive capability of the 2008 Next Generation Attenuation along with two regional models has been examined by several aftershock records obtained during these events. This paper is the first attempt made to compare the predictive capability of modern models based on significant aftershock data obtained for these two moderate events. Results confirmed that the ground motion models which have been derived based on larger-magnitude events should not directly be extrapolated to predict aftershock ground motions with magnitude smaller than 5.5, especially when we use relationships that developed without considering aftershock data. The residual analysis showed that the model of Abrahamson and Silva (Earthq Spectra, 24(1): 67–97, 2008) performed the best overall predictions in this study. However, this model performs poorly in the short period of 0.2 s at distances greater than 50 km which underestimates the spectral values for this case.