Spatial analysis of earthquake hazard in Tehran province and its zoning by utilizing fuzzy and AHP methods

Earthquake is a natural disaster which causes many problems. One action can be taken to reduce these problems is to use spatial analysis for the purpose of zoning its hazard and based on its results, planning and decision making can be done efficiently and effectively. The importance of this issue is more in Tehran province because of containing the capital of our country and the accumulation of assets. Therefore, in this research, Tehran province was considered as the case study. In the next step, some criteria maps such as distance to fault lines, their density, the magnificence and depth of previous earthquakes, distance to them and topographic situation of our study area were produced. Then a linear fuzzy membership function was applied for each criterion. The AHP method was used to determine weight of them and finally they were overlaid with the help of the fuzzy sum method. Tehran province was classified into three classes of law, moderate and high hazard and for each county, the percentage area of each category was determined. It shows that 70 percent of Shemirant and about 50 percent of Tehran, Firozkoh and Damavand counties were located in areas with high hazard.