Seismological and Engineering Demand Misfits for Evaluating Simulated Ground Motion Records

Abstract

Simulated ground motions have recently gained more attention in seismology and earthquake engineering. Since different characteristics of waveforms are expected to influence alternative structural response parameters, evaluation of simulations, for key components of seismological and engineering points of view is necessary. When seismological aspect is of concern, consideration of a representative set of ground motion parameters is imperative. Besides, to test the applicability of simulations in earthquake engineering, structural demand parameters should simultaneously cover a descriptive set. Herein, simulations are evaluated through comparison of seismological against engineering misfits, individually defined in terms of log-scale misfit and goodness-of-fit score. For numerical investigations, stochastically simulated records of three earthquakes are considered: The 1992 Erzincan-Turkey, 1999 Duzce-Turkey and 2009 L’Aquila-Italy events. For misfit evaluation, seismological parameters include amplitude, duration and frequency content, while engineering parameters contain spectral acceleration, velocity and seismic input energy. Overall, the same trend between both misfits is observed. All misfits for Erzincan and Duzce located on basins are larger than those corresponding to L’Aquila mostly placed on stiff sites. The engineering misfits, particularly in terms of input energy measures, are larger than seismological misfits. In summary, the proposed misfit evaluation methodology seems useful to evaluate simulations for engineering practice.