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The 2014 M L 5.9 Fanglin earthquake occurred at the northern end of the aftershock distribution of the 2013 M L 6.4 Ruisui event and caused strong ground shaking and some damage in the northern part of the Longitudinal Valley. We carried out the strong-motion simulation of the 2014 Fanglin event in the broadband frequency range (0.4–10 Hz) using the empirical Green’s function method and then integrated the source models to investigate the source characteristics of the 2013 Ruisui and 2014 Fanglin events. The results show that the dimension of strong motion generation area of the 2013 Ruisui event is smaller, whereas that of the 2014 Fanglin event is comparable with the empirical estimation of inland crustal earthquakes, which indicates the different faulting behaviors. Furthermore, the localized high PGV patch might be caused by the radiation energy amplified by the local low-velocity structure in the northern Longitudinal Valley. Additional study issues are required for building up the knowledge of the potential seismic hazard related to moderate-large events for various seismogenic areas in Taiwan.

The 2016 ML 6.6 Meinong earthquake struck southern Taiwan and caused serious damage due to the strong ground shaking. Anomalous seismicity spatiotemporal signature changes were identified prior to the 2016 Meinong event. We investigate the seismicity rate changes associated with the 2016 Meinong mainshock by applying the region-time-length (RTL) algorithm. The temporal result reveals a long obvious seismic quiescence stage soon after the 2012 Wutai event lasting until the 2016 Meinong mainshock. The spatial pattern of different background period lengths all exhibit that the 2016 Meinong event occurred near the abnormal seismic quiescence patch. Our study shows that the spatiotemporal information of the seismicity change could be a useful indication for potential seismic-hazard assessment.

In Taiwan, the Nantou area is a seismically active region where several moderate events have occurred, causing some disasters during the past century. Here, we applied the strong ground motion simulation with the empirical Green’s function method to investigate the source characteristics for the eight moderate blind-fault events that struck the Nantou area in 1999 and 2013. The results show that for these Nantou events, a high stress drop and focal depth dependence were noted, which might be related to the immature buried fault in this area. From the viewpoint of seismic hazard prevention and preparation, future earthquake scenarios that include high stress drop should be applied to more analyses, especially the moderate-to-large events originating from the immature blind faulting. Graphical abstract .

The 2013 M_L 6.4 Ruisui earthquake struck a seismic gap around the northern part of the Longitudinal Valley where rare earthquakes have occurred for at least two decades. Seismic data with different frequency bands connote a diverse scale of source characteristics. The slip model derived by a previous study using long-period seismic data provided us with the preliminary earthquake source properties in low-frequency energy radiation. However, the high-frequency part of the seismic energy needs to be considered for the strong motions in the comprehensive frequency band. As a case study, we carried out broadband strong motion simulations through the hybrid scheme, which simulated waveforms combining the low-frequency motions (frequency-wavenumber integration method) and high-frequency motions (empirical Green's function method) to reveal the strong ground motion and source characteristics of the 2013 Ruisui earthquake. The results show that even though the local structure is complicated this hybrid simulation can effectively rebuild the overall broadband strong ground motion characteristics for the 2013 Ruisui earthquake. Additional study issues are required to better understand the nature of localized high peak ground acceleration and the related seismic hazards for future earthquakes.