On the issue of converting the seismic intensity of the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) scale into the MSK macroseismic scale

Abstract

Relevance. Adequate assessment of the effect of certain strong earthquakes is one of the main tasks of engineering seismology. At the same time, despite the achievements in this area, certain aspects of this task still remain unclear. The use of global strong motion databases containing instrumental records of earthquakes involves the unification of not only earthquake data, such as magnitude, but also the macroseismic effect, or the seismic effect corresponding to the record, at a particular site. Some of the most comprehensive databases are the Japanese K-NET and KiK-net databases. The aim of the paper was to establish a relationship for converting intensities from JMA (Japan) to MSK (Russia) scale. Methods. Comparison and analysis of real data given in literature sources and their interpolation. Results. An analysis of known methods for obtaining relationships between various seismic scales of the world was performed. The unevenness of these scales was established, due to the peculiarities of the reaction of indicator objects. The most reasonable relationships have been identified for converting intensity values obtained in various ranges of the JMA seismic scale into values of the MSK or MMI seismic scale (USA, Europe).