Earthquake hazard assessment through geospatial model and development of EaHaAsTo tool for visualization: an integrated geological and geoinformatics approach

An earthquake is a natural phenomenon which is very frequent in Himalayan region in India. In southern peninsula India, the spatial occurrence of earthquake is irregular, whereas the northeastern, the north and the northwestern Himalayan parts of India are subjected to regular occurrences of earthquakes as they mark the boundary of the Eurasian and the Indian Plate. Hence, it is important to study and develop spatial model and information tool to understand the seismic phenomenon. The geoinformatic technique plays a significant role in the analysis of geodatabase to study the natural disaster and hazard assessment. The main aim of the present study is to develop geospatial model based on earthquake hazard assessment tool (EaHaAsTo) through integrated geological and geoinformatic techniques to better understand the earthquake occurrences zones. The spatial and non-spatial data were collected and integrated in a GIS to prepare geospatial databases. The thematic and quantitative databases were generated, and analysis was carried out to understand the seismic characteristics of the study area. The geospatial model was developed by integrating thematic databases and geospatial analyzed using weighted linear combination method. Finally, the GIS based on customized EaHaAsTo was developed to visualize the output of the model in qualitative and quantitative forms.