Seismogenic potential and earthquake hazard assessment in the Tell Atlas of Algeria

Seismotectonic zonation studies in the Tell Atlas of Algeria, a branch of t he Africa-Eurasia plate boundary, provide a valuable input for deterministi c seismic hazard calculations. We delineate a number of seismogenic zones f rom causal relationships established between geological structures and eart hquakes and compile a working seismic catalogue mainly from readily availab le sources. To this catalogue, for a most rational and best-justified hazar d analysis, we add estimates of earthquake size translated from active faul ting characteristics. We assess the regional seismic hazard using a determi nistic procedure based on the computation of complete synthetic seismograms (up to 1 Hz) by the modal summation technique. As a result, we generate se ismic hazard maps of maximum velocity, maximum displacement, and design gro und acceleration that blend information from geology, historical seismicity and observational seismology, leading to better estimates of the earthquak e hazard throughout northern Algeria. Our analysis and the resulting maps i llustrate how different the estimate of seismic hazard is based primarily o n combined geologic and seismological data with respect to the one for whic h only information from earthquake catalogues has been used.