The Quick Assessment Model of Casualties for Asia based on the Vulnerability of Earthquake

Abstract. In order to make a scientific emergency strategic decision after an earthquake, casualties need to be estimated rapidly. Asia is the most earthquake-prone continent in the world. In this paper, by spatial statistic and regressive analysis of historical Asian earthquake data from 1990 to 2012, vulnerability curves portraying the empirical relationship between the magnitude of an earthquake event and the casualty rate caused by it were created for countries of six-groups and the Quick Assessment Model of Earthquake Casualties for Asia (QAMECA) was developed. The casualty rate was defined as the ratio of the sum of injuries and deaths in an earthquake to the number of people living in the earthquake-affected region. Thirty-one earthquake events from 2013 to 2016 were used to validate this model, and the validation results were good with actual casualties of twenty-one were within the range estimated by the model and the biases of eight out of ten were less than one hundred percent. The two input parameters of QAMECA were magnitude and location of epicenter of an earthquake and earthquake casualties can be estimated immediately after earthquake has occurred. As a consequence, QAMECA can be used to estimate earthquake casualties for Asian countries and aid decision making in international emergency relief in the future.