Influence of Source, Path, and Site Effects on the Magnitude Dependence of Ground‐Motion Decay with Distance

2015 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alain Dujardin ◽  
Françoise Courboulex ◽  
Mathieu Causse ◽  
Paola Traversa
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
pp. 875529302110194
Author(s):  
Daniel Verret ◽  
Denis LeBœuf ◽  
Éric Péloquin

Eastern North America (ENA) is part of a region with low-to-moderate seismicity; nonetheless, some significant seismic events have occurred in the last few decades. Recent events have reemphasized the need to review ENA seismicity and ground motion models, along with continually reevaluating and updating procedures related to the seismic safety assessment of hydroelectric infrastructures, particularly large dams in Québec. Furthermore, recent researchers have shown that site-specific characteristics, topography, and valley shapes may significantly aggravate the severity of ground motions. To the best of our knowledge, very few instrumental data from actual earthquakes have been published for examining the site effects of hydroelectric dam structures located in eastern Canada. This article presents an analysis of three small earthquakes that occurred in 1999 and 2002 at the Denis-Perron (SM-3) dam. This dam, the highest in Québec, is a rockfill embankment structure with a height of 171 m and a length of 378 m; it is located in a narrow valley. The ground motion datasets of these earthquakes include the bedrock and dam crest three-component accelerometer recordings. Ground motions are analyzed both in the time and frequency domains. The spectral ratios and transfer functions obtained from these small earthquakes provide new insights into the directionality of resonant frequencies, vibration modes, and site effects for the Denis-Perron dam. The crest amplifications observed for this dam are also compared with previously published data for large dams. New statistical relationships are proposed to establish dam crest amplification on the basis of the peak ground acceleration (PGA) at the foundation.


Geosciences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Alessandro Todrani ◽  
Giovanna Cultrera

On 24 August 2016, a Mw 6.0 earthquake started a damaging seismic sequence in central Italy. The historical center of Amatrice village reached the XI degree (MCS scale) but the high vulnerability alone could not explain the heavy damage. Unfortunately, at the time of the earthquake only AMT station, 200 m away from the downtown, recorded the mainshock, whereas tens of temporary stations were installed afterwards. We propose a method to simulate the ground motion affecting Amatrice, using the FFT amplitude recorded at AMT, which has been modified by the standard spectral ratio (SSR) computed at 14 seismic stations in downtown. We tested the procedure by comparing simulations and recordings of two later mainshocks (Mw 5.9 and Mw 6.5), underlining advantages and limits of the technique. The strong motion variability of simulations was related to the proximity of the seismic source, accounted for by the ground motion at AMT, and to the peculiar site effects, described by the transfer function at the sites. The largest amplification characterized the stations close to the NE hill edge and produced simulated values of intensity measures clearly above one standard deviation of the GMM expected for Italy, up to 1.6 g for PGA.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karina Loviknes ◽  
Danijel Schorlemmer ◽  
Fabrice Cotton ◽  
Sreeram Reddy Kotha

<p>Non-linear site effects are mainly expected for strong ground motions and sites with soft soils and more recent ground-motion models (GMM) have started to include such effects. Observations in this range are, however, sparse, and most non-linear site amplification models are therefore partly or fully based on numerical simulations. We develop a framework for testing of non-linear site amplification models using data from the comprehensive Kiban-Kyoshin network in Japan. The test is reproducible, following the vision of the Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP), and takes advantage of new large datasets to evaluate <span>whether or not</span> non-linear site effects predicted by site-amplification models are supported by empirical data. The site amplification models are tested using residuals between the observations and predictions from a GMM based only on magnitude and distance. When the GMM is derived without any site term, the site-specific variability extracted from the residuals is expected to capture the site response of a site. The non-linear site amplification models are tested against a linear amplification model on individual well-record<span>ing</span> stations. Finally, the result is compared to building codes where non-linearity is included. The test shows that for most of the sites selected as having sufficient records, the non-linear site-amplification models do not score better than the linear amplification model. This suggests that including non-linear site amplification in GMMs and building codes may not yet be justified, at least not in the range of ground motions considered in the test (peak ground acceleration < 0.2 g).</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 856-879 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher A de la Torre ◽  
Brendon A Bradley ◽  
Robin L Lee

This study examines the performance of nonlinear total stress one-dimensional (1D) wave propagation site response analysis for modeling site effects in physics-based ground motion simulations of the 2010–2011 Canterbury, New Zealand earthquake sequence. This approach explicitly models three-dimensional (3D) ground motion phenomena at the regional scale, and detailed site effects at the local scale. The approach is compared with a more commonly used empirical VS30-based method of computing site amplification for simulated ground motions, as well as prediction via an empirical ground motion model. Site-specific ground response analysis is performed at 20 strong motion stations in Christchurch for 11 earthquakes with 4.7≤ MW≤7.1. When compared with the VS30-based approach, the wave propagation analysis reduces both overall model bias and uncertainty in site-to-site residuals at the fundamental period, and significantly reduces systematic residuals for soft or “atypical” sites that exhibit strong site amplification. The comparable performance in ground motion prediction between the physics-based simulation method and empirical ground motion models suggests the former is a viable approach for generating site-specific ground motions for geotechnical and structural response history analyses.


2020 ◽  
pp. 875529302095244
Author(s):  
Shu-Hsien Chao ◽  
Che-Min Lin ◽  
Chun-Hsiang Kuo ◽  
Jyun-Yan Huang ◽  
Kuo-Liang Wen ◽  
...  

We propose a methodology to implement horizontal-to-vertical Fourier spectral ratios (HVRs) evaluated from strong ground motion induced by earthquake (EHVRs) or ambient ground motion observed from microtremor (MHVRs) individually and simultaneously with the spatial correlation (SC) in a ground-motion prediction equation (GMPE) to improve the prediction accuracy of site effects. We illustrated the methodology by developing an EHVRs-SC-based model which supplements Vs30 and Z1.0 with the SC and EHVRs collected at strong motion stations, and a MHVRs-SC-based model that supplements Vs30 and Z1.0 with the SC and MHVRs observed from microtremors at sites which were collocated with strong motion stations. The standard deviation of the station-specific residuals can be reduced by up to 90% when the proposed models are used to predict site effects. In the proposed models, the spatial distribution of the predicted station terms for peak ground acceleration (PGA) from MHVRs at 3699 sites is consistent with that of the predicted station terms for PGA from EHVRs at 721 strong motion stations. Prediction accuracy for stations with inferred Vs30 is similar to that of stations with measured Vs30 with the proposed models. This study provides a methodology to simultaneously implement SC and EHVRs, or SC and MHVRs in a GMPE to improve the prediction accuracy of site effects for a target site with available EHVRs or MHVRs information.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Giovanni Iaccarino ◽  
Matteo Picozzi ◽  
Dino Bindi ◽  
Daniele Spallarossa

<p>Including site specific amplification factors in ground motion prediction models represented an advance for PSHA (Atkinson 2006; Rodríguez-Marek et al. 2013; Kotha et al. 2017) that has become nowadays a standard. However, this issue has only recently received attention by the seismological community of earthquake early warning (EEW) (Spallarossa et al., 2019; Zhao and Zhao, 2019), which applications require a real-time prediction of ground motion and the delivery of alert messages to users for mitigating their exposure to seismic risk. Indeed, all EEW systems are high-technological infrastructures devoted to the real-time and automatic detection of earthquakes, rapid assessment of the associated seismic hazard for targets and the prompt delivery of alerts trough fast telecommunication networks. Among them, the on-site approaches are based on seismic networks placed near to the target, indifferently by the location of seismic threats and they issue the alert predicting the ground motion at the target from P-wave parameter. This configuration cause that On-Site EEWS are generally highly affected by site conditions.</p><p>In this work, we calibrated ground motion prediction models for on-site EEW considering acceleration response spectra (RSA) and the P-waves EEW parameters Iv2 and Pd, and we investigated the role of site-effects. We considered a dataset of nearly 60 earthquakes belonging to the Central Italy 2016-17 sequence. The high density of stations near to the sequence has allowed us to use a non-ergodic random-effect regression approach to explore and to reduce the contribution of site-effects to the uncertainty of the On-site laws predictions. We grouped the records in two ways: by stations and by EC8 classification. Then, we validated the estimated models by the Leave One Out (L1Out) technique and applied a K-means analysis to assess the performance of the EC8 classification.</p><p>The residuals analysis proved that grouping by station provides a set of relations that improves the predictions at many stations. On the contrary, L1Out cross-validation proved that the regressions retrieved grouping by EC8 classification produce higher uncertainties on the predictions than the others. Furthermore, the cross-validation proved that Iv2 is more correlated to RSA than Pd. Finally, the analysis of the random effect vs period curves confirmed that EC8 classification is unrelated to the site effect on RSA even looking only at the trend of these curves.</p><p>In conclusion, non-ergodic random-effect regression can be used also in the EEW applications to predict site-specific ground motion. EEWS that use this approach are less dependent by site-effect and able to provide more precise and reliable alerts.</p>


2000 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun Yang ◽  
Tadanobu Sato ◽  
Xiang-Song Li

Recently there has been an increased interest in the study of the nonlinearity in soil response for large strains through in situ earthquake observations. In this paper, the downhole array acceleration data recorded at a reclaimed island, Kobe, during the 1995 Kobe earthquake are used to study nonlinear site effects. Particular attention is given to the liquefaction-induced nonlinear effects on the recorded ground motions. By using the spectral ratio and the spectral-smoothing technique, the characteristics of the ground motions are analyzed. It is shown that the peak frequencies in spectral ratios were shifted to lower frequencies when the strongest motions occurred. The increase in the predominant period was caused primarily by a strong attenuation of low-period waves, rather than by amplification of long-period motions. Based on the spectral analyses, the nonlinearity occurring in the shallow liquefied layer during the shaking event is identified, manifested by a significant reduction of the shear modulus. A fully coupled, inelastic, finite element analysis of the response of the array site is carried out. The stress-strain histories of soils and excess pore-water pressures at different depths are calculated. It is suggested that the stress-strain response and the build up of pore pressure are well correlated to the variation of the characteristics of ground motions during the shaking history.Key words: site response, ground motion, nonlinearity, soil liquefaction, array records, Kobe earthquake.


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