The primary goal of NEESgrid data/metadata effort is to work collaboratively with NEESgrid System Integrator team and the NEES community and to help define data requirements and needs for the George Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation instigated by the National Science Foundation. The NEESgrid promotes NEES as a distributed virtual laboratory for earthquake engineering resea...

A seismic risk assessment is often performed on behalf of a buyer of large commercial buildings in seismically active regions. One outcome of the assessment is that a probable maximum loss (PML) is computed. PML is of limited use to real-estate investors as it has no place in a standard financial analysis and reflects too long a planning period for what-if scenarios. We introduce an alternative...

This paper introduces the application of seismic wave method in earthquake prediction and early estimation. The advantages of the seismic wave method over the traditional earthquake prediction method are demonstrated. An example is presented in this study to show the accuracy and efficiency of using the seismic wave method in predicting a medium-sized earthquake swarm occurred in Wencheng, Zhej...

Foundations may undergo severe distress during an earthquake. One such example of foundation failure involving toppling of apartment blocks due to liquefaction during the 1964 Niigata Earthquake is presented in Figure 1. Earthquake effects on shallow and deep foundations are accounted for by designing them structurally to provide necessary strength and ensure serviceability. Strength considerat...

Damage from two earthquakes that occurred in 2007 was surveyed. The 2007 Sumatra earthquake struck Indonesia. The results were typical of damage observed in developing countries from this magnitude event. Due to questinable detailing and inadequate construction practices, there was significant structural damage, including thousands of collapsed structures. The damage exceeded what is expected f...

Social media such as Facebook and Twitter have proven to be a useful resource to understand public opinion towards real world events. In this paper, we investigate over 1.5 million Twitter messages (tweets) for the period 9 March 2011 to 31 May 2011 in order to track awareness and anxiety levels in the Tokyo metropolitan district to the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and subsequent tsunami and nuclear ...

Natural fault surfaces exhibit roughness at all scales, with root-mean-square height fluctuations of order 10−3 to 10−2 times the profile length. We study earthquake rupture propagation on such faults, using strongly rate-weakening fault friction and offfault plasticity. Inelastic deformation bounds stresses to reasonable values and prevents fault opening. Stress perturbations induced by slip o...

Wavelet analysis is a new mathematical technique and in the recent years enormous interest in application of engineering has been observed. This new technique is particularly suitable for non-stationary processes as in contrast to the Fourier transform (FT). The wavelet transform (WT) allows exceptional localization, both in time and frequency domains. The application of the WT to earthquake en...

A critical issue in the probabilistic framework for performance-based earthquake engineering is the choice of ground motion intensity measure(s). In an effort to identify optimum intensity measure(s), a comprehensive parametric statistical study based on 881 earthquake record components was conducted to identify the correlation between (1) seismological variables (SV’s) and traditional ground m...