ORIGINAL ARTICLE Probabilistic earthquake hazard analysis for Cairo, Egypt Ahmed Badawy & Ibrahim Korrat & Mahmoud El-Hadidy & Hanan Gaber Received: 19 January 2015 /Accepted: 10 November 2015 /Published online: 16 November 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 Abstract Cairo is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the sixteenth largest metropolitan area in the world. It was founded in the tenth century (969 AD) and is 1046 years old. It has long been a center of the region’ s political and cultural life. Therefore, the earthquake risk assessment for Cairo has a great importance. The present work aims to analysis the earthquake hazard of Cairo as a key input’ s element for the risk assessment. The regional seismotectonics setting shows that Cairo could be af- fected by both far- and near-field seismic sources. The seismic hazard of Cairo has been estimated using the probabilistic seismic hazard approach. The logic tree frame work was used during the calculations. Epistemic uncertainties were considered into account by using alternative seismotectonics models and alter- native ground motion prediction equations. Seismic hazard values have been estimated within a grid of 0.1°×0.1 ° spacing for all of Cairo’ s districts at different spectral periods and four return periods (224, 615, 1230, and 4745 years). Moreover, the uniform hazard spectra have been calculated at the same return periods. The pattern of the contour maps show that the highest values of the peak ground acceleration is concentrated in the eastern zone’ s districts (e.g., El Nozha) and the lowest values at the northern and western zone’ s districts (e.g., El Sharabiya and El Khalifa). Keywords Earthquakes . Seismicity . Seismotectonics . Probabilistic . Hazard . Cairo . Egypt 1 Introduction In the Middle East and North Africa region, the synergy of natural disasters, rapid urbanization, water scarcity, and climate change has emerged as a serious challenge for policy and planning. This synergy has reconfigured risk landscapes by making the region’ s natural resource base fragile and extremely susceptible to a variety of internal and external factors. Despite the different levels of development, between 1980 and 2010, 81 % of disas- ter events were concentrated in just six countries: Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Iran, Morocco, and Yemen (World Bank Development Report 2014). In the last 30 years, Egypt has faced 23 large natural disaster events, floods, earth- quakes, and landslides, causing over US$1.3 billion in damages (PreventionWeb: Egypt Disaster Statistics). Cairo is arguably the largest city in the Middle East and North Africa is a chaotic megalopolis where life is characterized by extremes, both of tradition and of mo- dernity. Satellite pictures show the city sprawling out in every direction, expanding in the north toward the Nile Delta and encroaching upon its scarce arable land. Since ancient times, the river has been the lifeline of Egyptian society. This is still true, particularly with respect to J Seismol (2016) 20:449–461 DOI 10.1007/s10950-015-9537-5 A. Badawy (*) : M. El-Hadidy : H. Gaber Seismology Department, National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics, Cairo, Egypt e-mail: ahmedbadawy@Yahoo.com I. Korrat Geology Department, Faculty of Sciences, Mansoura University, Mansoura, Egypt