Southern California Earthquake Center

Most CVM computer codes are not necessarily optimized to work seamlessly with earthquake simulation codes. Modelers use additional tools to convert the data retrieved from a given CVM into grids or meshes. One particular tool of the sort is the unified community velocity model (UCVM) software framework (Small et al. 2015). UCVM is a collection of software tools developed and maintained by the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) to provide an efficient and standard access to multiple, alternative velocity models. Although UCVM was primarily bruit to manage the SCEC community velocity models CVM-S and CVM-H for Southern California (Fig. 7), it supports and can be used to register other models as well. 

There is an ample spectrum of physics-based simulations available in the literature. Most of them have been published over the last two decades after supercomputing centers open for pubUc research became available in the mid- to late 1990s and early 2000s, which boosted the capacity of modelers to cmiduct regional-scale simulations at resolutions not possible before parallel computer codes were developed and tested. Some of these simulations have already been cited to ihus-trate the various aspects involved in physics-based simulation. However, they cannot all possibly be covered here, thus only a small selection is addressed next. The selection includes examples of scenario and real earthquake simulations that have been used in verification and validation studies those are the simulations of the Great Southern California ShakeOut and the 2008 Chino Hills, California, earthquake. Also covered here to a lesser extent is the application of physics-based simulation as a tool to construct a physics-based framework for probabilistic seismic hazard analysis, as it is done in the CyberShake project of the Southern California Earthquake Center. 

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