Synthetic uniform-hazard site specific response spectrum

A stochastic model, nonlinear site response computations, and Monte Carlo statistics are incorporated into a process which is used to synthesize the uniform-hazard site specific response spectrum. This procedure, termed the SvE procedure, uses the Monte Carlo process for simulating the seismicity in the seismic areas neighboring the investigated site and to quantify the source parameters of the earthquakes in the simulated catalogues. Stochastic simulations are then applied to each of the listed earthquakes to generate the synthetic S-wave ground accelerations. For sites which are composed of thick layers of soil, each of the synthesized accelerograms is corrected for the nonlinear response of the site. The synthetic free surface S-wave accelerations are used to compute the response spectra for a given damping. Simple statistical analysis of the obtained spectral amplitudes is applied to determine the response spectrum where each of its determined spectral amplitudes has the same prescribed probability of being exceeded. The SvE procedure is demonstrated by determining the uniform-hazard response spectrum of an arbitrarily chosen site in Israel to which hypothetical, yet realistic, soil properties have been assigned.