Earthquake ground motions induced by a scenario event are spatially (partially) correlated and (partially) coherent. Simulated ground motion records can be used to carry out nonlinear inelastic time history analysis for a portfolio of buildings to estimate the seismic loss, which is advantageous as there is no need to develop and apply empirical ground motion prediction equations and the ductil...

Water storage tanks not designed explicitly for seismic loading could require retrofit. One of the common ways of retrofit include some structural change in the lateral load resisting system that could be expensive and requires the tank to be out of service for relatively long time. This paper introduces a novel method to reduce seismic demand on tank’s wall without structural intervention. Thi...

The sensitivity of the seismic response parameters to the uncertain modeling variables of pile-founded fixed steel jacket platforms are investigated using the Tornado diagram and the first-order second-moment techniques. The effects of both aleatory and epistemic uncertainty on seismic response parameters have been investigated for an existing offshore platform. The sources of uncertainty consi...

The earthquake engineering community recognizes the need to improve current seismic codes and design methods in the light of recent inadequate behavior of building structures. Presently, the performance-based earthquake engineering is being envisioned as the solution to this problem. In this new design approach, the desired behavior of the building is formulated first in the conceptual stage fo...

This paper comprehensively evaluates the Modal Pushover Analysis (MPA) procedure against the ‘‘exact’’ nonlinear response history analysis (RHA) and investigates the accuracy of seismic demands determined by pushover analysis using FEMA-356 force distributions; the MPA procedure in this paper contains several improvements over the original version presented in Chopra and Goel (2002). Seismic de...

Western gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) aggregate off the northeastern coast of Sakhalin Island, Russia during summer-autumn to feed on benthic and near-benthic prey. During summer 2001, 3D seismic surveys were conducted during a six-week period in known gray whale foraging areas off Sakhalin Island. To test the hypothesis that the distribution of gray whales on the feeding ground would shi...

Broader Impacts. The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) conducts a broad program of earthquake system science that seeks to develop a predictive understanding of earthquake processes with a practical mission aimed at providing society with improved understanding of seismic hazards. In partnership with earthquake engineers, SCEC researchers are developing the ability to conduct end-to-...

Buildings should be designed to resist moderate ground motion with­ out structural damage and resist intense ground motion with controlled damage. However, most codes do not consider both these requirements explicitly and specify a single design earthquake that generally corresponds to intense ground motion. Investigated in this study is the response of one-story, asymmetric-plan systems design...

Adaptive Incremental Dynamic Analysis (AIDA) is a novel ground motion selection scheme that adaptively changes the ground motion suites at different ground motion intensity levels to match hazardconsistent properties for structural response assessment. Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA), a current dynamic response history analysis practice in Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering (PBEE), use...