2015 – Development of Ground Motion Time Histories for Seismic Design

Paul Somerville, Andreas Skarlatoudis, and Hong Kie Thio

Engineers need ground motion time histories for the analysis of the response of structures to earthquake ground shaking. In current practice, these time histories are usually spectrally matched to a uniform hazard response spectrum. At low probabilities, this spectrum is too “broadband” (i.e. large over an unrealistically broad range of periods), and envelopes a set of more appropriate design response spectra, termed conditional mean spectra. These concepts are illustrated using a site-specific probabilistic seismic hazard analysis of ground shaking in which ground motion time histories are spectrally matched to conditional mean spectra that were derived from the uniform hazard spectrum.
Keywords: Ground motion time histories, Conditional mean spectrum.

Buy this resource

$15.00