Abstract
On 6 February 2016 (UTC 19:57), the Meinong earthquake with Richter magnitude (M-L) 6.6 struck southern Taiwan and caused hundreds of damaged buildings, resulting in 117 casualties. We investigated the relationship between the damaged buildings and the ground motion in the forms of peak ground acceleration (PGA), peak ground velocity (PGV), pseudo-spectral acceleration (SA) at 0.3s (SA0.3), 1.0 s (SA1.0), and shaking duration to identify which ground motion parameter most represents building damage. PGV and SA1.0 present better correlation with consequent damage. The Intensity converted from PGV presents better correlation to the damage than PGA. We disaggregated the TEM PSHA2015 hazard contribution to the Meinong earthquake damage region (Southern Taiwan) from different seismic source typologies to clarify the seismic source contributing to the hazard. The hazards contributed by the Meinong earthquake were 16, 26, and 23% for PGA, SA0.3, and SA1.0, respectively. The predicted seismic hazard source areas were 38, 61, and 75% for PGA, SA0.3, and SA1.0, respectively, for the PSHA with a return period of 475 years. This result indicates that the 2016 Meinong earthquake did partially diminish the seismic hazard potential in southern Taiwan. However, more than about 80% of the seismic hazard potential, especially the fault sources were not yet released. These values suggest that the seismic hazard potential in southern Taiwan remains high regardless of the 2016 Meinong earthquake.