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Room: Ballroom G

Date: 4/16/2026

Session Time: 8:00 AM to 9:15 AM (local time)

Earthquake Ground Motions and Structural Response: Emerging Tools and Applications

Understanding how buildings, bridges, energy infrastructure and the ground beneath them respond to earthquakes is central to both earthquake science and risk reduction. New monitoring approaches — ranging from permanent seismic networks and structural arrays to ambient vibration studies, and the rapid growth of low-cost MEMS and smartphone sensors — are expanding our ability to capture building dynamics and ground motion in unprecedented detail. These observations are providing new insights into structural health, damage processes, and soil-structure interaction and the region-wide distribution of risk for large earthquakes. Newly obtainable data also promises to support applications such as rapid post-event regional damage assessment and long-term seismic resilience.

This session invites contributions from across the seismological, engineering and hazard-modeling communities that address building and ground motion monitoring using traditional networks, emerging low-cost sensors, gradient based sensors such as distributed fiber optic sensing and rotational sensors, novel analytical methods or case studies from recent earthquakes and experiments. We especially encourage interdisciplinary studies that bridge seismology, structural engineering and risk mitigation; provide synergistic applications of unique data and high-performance simulations, as well as applications that highlight the potential for scalable monitoring at the urban or regional level.

Conveners

Richard Allen, University of California, Berkeley (rallen@berkeley.edu)
Felix Bernauer, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (felix.bernauer@lmu.de)
Farid Ghahari, California Geological Survey (ghahari@gmail.com)
Monica Kohler, California Institute of Technology (kohler@caltech.edu)
Utpal Kumar, University of California, Berkeley (utpalkumar@berkeley.edu)
David McCallen, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (dbmccallen@lbl.gov)
Yara Rossi, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (yara.rossi@lmu.de)

Oral Presentations