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Capturing Spatial Variability of Site Effects: from Geology to Proxy Considerations to inform Spatial Ground Motion Correlation Models

Description: 

Local soil conditions depict an important role in regional/system-level seismic hazard assessments due to their influence on earthquake-induced ground shaking and deformation. Site effects correlate with the concentration of damages in areas prone to ground motion (GM) amplification as documented after past earthquakes. Evaluating spatially variable GMs is also essential when investigating large, distributed civil infrastructure systems. Because soil properties can be spatially correlated at nearby locations, the expected site response will also be spatially correlated. This study focuses on the evaluation of spatial correlations in site parameters from the Japanese databases, Kyoshin Network (K-Net) and Kiban-Kyoshin Network (KiK-net), and their comparison to the observed spatial correlation of multiple ground motion intensity measures from the 2011 Tohoku Mw 9.1. Current spatial correlation models treat site effects either as a fixed amplification factor or as randomized amplifications, but site effects are neither fixed nor random. Hence, geostatistical methods are used here to estimate spatial correlations between parameters that control site response and integrate their effects on resulting spatially variable ground motions. In this work, we use kriging to evaluate the significance of the spatial correlation for different site parameters with respect to the GM amplification IMs for the 2011 Tohoku earthquake.

Session: From Sensors and Networks to Site Characterization and Site Response: Coming Full Circle

Type: Oral

Date: 4/18/2023

Presentation Time: 03:00 PM (local time)

Presenting Author: Cristina Lorenzo-Velazquez

Student Presenter: Yes

Invited Presentation: 

Authors