ARABIAN JOURNAL OF GEOSCIENCES, cilt.13, sa.18, 2020 (SCI-Expanded)
Turkey is bounded by the two of the most active fault zones: the North Anatolian Fault Zone (NAFZ) and the East Anatolian Fault Zone (EAFZ). Therefore, Turkey has experienced several great earthquakes (M> 7.0) in these fault zones. These earthquakes caused huge devastation on buildings and roads as a result of landslides and liquefaction. Because of these huge effects, we aim to evaluate earthquake hazards by calculating the conditional probability of an earthquake with three probabilistic models (Weibull, gamma, and lognormal) in three selected regions along the NAFZ and EAFZ. For this purpose, the model parameters were calculated by using maximum likelihood estimates from the earthquake (Mw >= 5.5) recurrence times that occurred between 1900 and 2016 in the study regions. The fitting of model and data were tested with the log-likelihood value, Akaike information criterion, and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov minimum distance criterion. The lognormal model is the best-fit model for three regions according to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance criterion while the gamma is the best for region 3 according to the other two test criteria. The gamma model gives the highest probability value (> 0.80) for all regions, and lognormal results reach the values > 0.90 for region 1 (t= 0,tau= 11), for region 2 (t= 0,tau= 7), and for region 3 (t= 0,tau= 11). These results indicated that the short-time-period earthquake probabilities are high in the study regions. On the other hand, this study will be very useful for assessing the seismic risk and constituting the disaster mitigation plans of the study regions.