Engineering observations on ground motion at the Van Norman Complex after the 1994 Northridge earthquake

1996 ◽  
Vol 86 (1B) ◽  
pp. S333-S349 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. P. Bardet ◽  
C. Davis

Abstract During the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the Van Norman Complex yielded an unprecedented number of recordings with high acceleration, in the close proximity of the fault rupture. These strong-motion recordings exhibited the pulses of the main event. One station recorded the largest velocity ever instrumentally recorded (177 cm/sec), resulting from a 0.86 g peak acceleration with a low frequency. Throughout the complex, the horizontal accelerations reached peak values ranging from 0.56 to 1.0 g, except for the complex center, where the peak acceleration did not exceed 0.43 g. The vertical acceleration reached maximum peak values comparable with those of the horizontal acceleration. The acceleration response spectra in the longitudinal and transverse directions were significantly different. Such a difference, which is not yet well documented in the field of geotechnical earthquake engineering, indicates that the amplitude and frequency content of the ground motion was directionally dependent in the Van Norman Complex.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sreeram Reddy Kotha ◽  
Graeme Weatherill ◽  
Dino Bindi ◽  
Fabrice Cotton

<p>Ground-Motion Models (GMMs) characterize the random distributions of ground-motions for a combination of earthquake source, wave travel-path, and the effected site’s geological properties. Typically, GMMs are regressed over a compendium of strong ground-motion recordings collected from several earthquakes recorded at multiple sites scattered across a variety of geographical regions. The necessity of compiling such large datasets is to expand the range of magnitude, distance, and site-types; in order to regress a GMM capable of predicting realistic ground-motions for rare earthquake scenarios, e.g. large magnitudes at short distances from a reference rock site. The European Strong-Motion (ESM) dataset is one such compendium of observations from a few hundred shallow crustal earthquakes recorded at a several hundred seismic stations in Europe and Middle-East.</p><p>We developed new GMMs from the ESM dataset, capable of predicting both the response spectra and Fourier spectra in a broadband of periods and frequencies, respectively. However, given the clear tectonic and geological diversity of the data, possible regional and site-specific differences in observed ground-motions needed to be quantified; whilst also considering the possible contamination of data from outliers. Quantified regional differences indicate that high-frequency ground-motions attenuate faster with distance in Italy compared to the rest of Europe, as well as systematically weaker ground-motions from central Italian earthquakes. In addition, residual analyses evidence anisotropic attenuation of low frequency ground-motions, imitating the pattern of shear-wave energy radiation. With increasing spatial variability of ground-motion data, the GMM prediction variability apparently increases. Hence, robust mixed-effects regressions and residual analyses are employed to relax the ergodic assumption.</p><p>Large datasets, such as the ESM, NGA-West2, and from KiK-Net, provide ample opportunity to identify and evaluate the previously hypothesized event-to-event, region-to-region, and site-to-site differences in ground-motions. With the appropriate statistical methods, these variabilities can be quantified and applied in seismic hazard and risk predictions. We intend to present the new GMMs: their development, performance and applicability, prospective improvements and research needs.</p>


1987 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. A. Abrahamson ◽  
B. A. Bolt ◽  
R. B. Darragh ◽  
J. Penzien ◽  
Y. B. Tsai

SMART 1 is the first large digital array of strong-motion seismographs specially designed for engineering and seismological studies of the generation and near-field properties of earthquakes. Since the array began operation in September 1980, it has recorded over 3000 accelerogram traces from 48 earthquakes ranging in local magnitude ( ML) from 3.6 to 7.0. Peak ground accelerations have been recorded up to 0.33g and 0.34g on the horizontal and vertical components, respectively. Epicentral distances have ranged from 3 km 200 km from the array center, and focal depths have ranged from shallow to 100 km. The recorded earthquakes had both reverse and strike-slip focal mechanisms associated with the subduction zone and transform faults. These high quality, digital, ground motions provide a varied resource for earthquake engineering research. Earthquake engineering studies of the SMART 1 ground motion data have led to advances in knowledge in several cases: for example, on frequency-dependent incoherency of free-surface ground motions over short distances, on response of linear systems to multiple support excitations, on attenuation of peak ground-motion parameters and response spectra, on site torsion and phasing effects, and on the identification of wave types. Accelerograms from individual strong-motion seismographs do not, in general, provide such information. This review describes the SMART 1 array and the recorded earthquakes with special engineering applications. Also, it tabulates the unfiltered peak array accelerations, displays some of the recorded ground motion time histories, and summarizes the main engineering research that has made use of SMART 1 data.


Nature ◽  
10.1038/37586 ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 390 (6660) ◽  
pp. 599-602 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward H. Field ◽  
Paul A. Johnson ◽  
Igor A. Beresnev ◽  
Yuehua Zeng

2002 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Anastassiadis ◽  
I. E. Avramidis ◽  
P. Panetsos

According to the model of Penzien and Watabe, the three translational ground motion components on a specific point of the ground are statistically noncorrelated along a well-defined orthogonal system of axes p, w, and v, whose orientation remains reasonably stable over time during the strong motion phase of an earthquake. This orthotropic ground motion is described by three generally independent response spectra Sa, Sb, and Sc, respectively. The paper presents an antiseismic design procedure for structures according to the above seismic motion model. This design includes a) determination of the critical orientation of the seismic input, i.e., the orientation that gives the largest response, b) calculation of the maximum and the minimum values of any response quantity, and c) application of either the Extreme Stress Method or the Extreme Force Method for determining the most unfavorable combinations of several stress resultants (or sectional forces) acting concurrently at a specified section of a structural member.


2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chikahiro Minowa

In this paper, a new method of baseline correction on strong motion acceleration records is presented and the fundamental concept for baseline corrections on the earthquake strong motions is described. Considering the filtering effect, the earthquakes ground motion displacements of 1995 JMA KOBE, 1999 Kocaeli YPT and 1999 Chi-Chi TCU068 are discussed. Also, the linear sloshing responses of large liquid tanks subjected to these motions were discussed. Since liquid storage tanks show the low frequency (long period) sloshing characteristics and the strong motion characteristics of 1999 Kocaeli and Chi-Chi earthquakes are also low frequencies and large permanent displacements, the sloshing responses in large liquid tanks, especially in long natural periods, were significantly affected by the low frequency motions (large permanent displacements) of these devastating earthquakes. It is very important to use suitable ground motion characterized low frequency content for earthquake resistant design of liquid storage tanks. The baseline correction method presented in the paper may be adequately used to correct strong motion records for large liquid storage design.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duruo Huang ◽  
Wenqi Du

Abstract. In performance-based seismic design, ground-motion time histories are needed for analyzing dynamic responses of nonlinear structural systems. However, the number of strong-motion data at design level is often limited. In order to analyze seismic performance of structures, ground-motion time histories need to be either selected from recorded strong-motion database, or numerically simulated using stochastic approaches. In this paper, a detailed procedure to select proper acceleration time histories from the Next Generation Attenuation (NGA) database for several cities in Taiwan is presented. Target response spectra are initially determined based on a local ground motion prediction equation under representative deterministic seismic hazard analyses. Then several suites of ground motions are selected for these cities using the Design Ground Motion Library (DGML), a recently proposed interactive ground-motion selection tool. The selected time histories are representatives of the regional seismic hazard, and should be beneficial to earthquake studies when comprehensive seismic hazard assessments and site investigations are yet available. Note that this method is also applicable to site-specific motion selections with the target spectra near the ground surface considering the site effect.


2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 1427-1448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara Smerzini ◽  
Carmine Galasso ◽  
Iunio Iervolino ◽  
Roberto Paolucci

The increasing interest in performance-based earthquake engineering has promoted research on the improvement of hazard-consistent seismic input definition and on advanced criteria for strong motion record selection to perform nonlinear time history analyses. Within the ongoing research activities to improve the representation of seismic actions and to develop tools as a support for engineering practice, this study addresses the selection of displacement-spectrum-compatible real ground motions, with special reference to Italy. This involved (1) the definition of specific target displacement spectra for Italian sites, constrained—both at long and short periods—by results of probabilistic seismic hazard analyses; (2) the compilation of a high-quality strong ground motion database; and (3) the development of a software tool for computer-aided displacement-based record selection. Application examples show that sets of unscaled, or lightly scaled, accelerograms with limited record-to-record spectral variability can also easily be obtained when a broadband spectral compatibility is required.


2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 973-987 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yousef Bozorgnia ◽  
Norman A. Abrahamson ◽  
Linda Al Atik ◽  
Timothy D. Ancheta ◽  
Gail M. Atkinson ◽  
...  

The NGA-West2 project is a large multidisciplinary, multi-year research program on the Next Generation Attenuation (NGA) models for shallow crustal earthquakes in active tectonic regions. The research project has been coordinated by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER), with extensive technical interactions among many individuals and organizations. NGA-West2 addresses several key issues in ground-motion seismic hazard, including updating the NGA database for a magnitude range of 3.0–7.9; updating NGA ground-motion prediction equations (GMPEs) for the “average” horizontal component; scaling response spectra for damping values other than 5%; quantifying the effects of directivity and directionality for horizontal ground motion; resolving discrepancies between the NGA and the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) site amplification factors; analysis of epistemic uncertainty for NGA GMPEs; and developing GMPEs for vertical ground motion. This paper presents an overview of the NGA-West2 research program and its subprojects.


2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander A. Gusev ◽  
Victor M. Pavlov

A kinematic, stochastic fault model and simulation procedure is proposed for realistic, application-oriented simulation of earthquake ground motion. An extended fault plane is discretized as a grid of point subsources. Subsource signal, in its low-frequency part, is produced by a dislocation strip sweeping the fault area. In its high-frequency part, it is defined by random local slip history, represented by a segment of pulsed noise. Subsource signals are convolved with broad-band Green functions for a layered half-space, and stacked, resulting in the ground motion at a site. Through a special choice of subsource signals, the Fourier spectrum of ground motion obeys an observation-based scaling law. Effects of the rupture velocity behavior, rise time, wavenumber spectrum for the final slip, the degree of spikiness of time functions etc can be easily analyzed. For illustration, several near-source 1994 Northridge earthquake records are simulated, and related uncertainties are estimated.


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