This paper briefly reviews the development of earthquake resistant design of buildings. The state-of-the-art of seismic design is discussed from the viewpoint of the performance criteria of buildings. These are (a) serviceability from frequent minor-intensity earthquake motions, (b) repairability from an infrequent but major-intensity earthquake motion, and (c) life safety from the maximum poss...

During an earthquake, the motion of the ground spatially changes, in both amplitude and phase. The spatial variation of seismic ground motions has an important effect on the response of large structures such as bridges and dams. To be able to simulate seismic ground motions which vary in space, a representing spatial variability model is required. Data collected from closely spaced arrays of se...

We have been trying to make a recipe for predicting ground motions from future large earthquakes. To do that the most important factors are the source characterizations for complex rupture processes and the Green’s function estimations for realistic geological structures. We attempt to formulate the source characterizations based on recent results of the waveform source inversion. There are two...

For civil protection reasons there is a strong need to improve the inventory of areas that are more vulnerable to earthquake ground motions or to earthquake-related secondary effects, such as landslides, liquefaction or soil amplifications. The use of remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) methods along with the related geo-databases can assist local and national authorities to...

A recently developed nonstationary stochastic model of strong earthquake ground motion is described. The model employs filtering of a white-noise process, where nonstationarity is achieved by modulating the intensity and varying the filter parameters in time. The model is fitted to a target accelerogram by matching a set of statistical measures that characterize the evolution of the intensity, ...

Offshore structures such as jacket platforms have to inevitably be designed against  sever  environmental actions. In seismically active areas these structures also become susceptible to earthquake excitations. Strong ground motions recorded  in recent earthquakes, including the 1995 Kobe, Japan, 1999 Chi-chi, Taiwan and 1999 Kocaeli, Turkey earthquakes, revealed that the dynamic motions in nea...

Introduction The heterogeneities in the crust and upper mantle structure as well as the complex source rupture process have an important influence on regional seismic wavefield, particularly for high-frequency waves. Moreover small-scale heterogeneities such as for the sedimentary basin introduce significant amplification of ground motion, which lead to long ground shaking over several minutes ...