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A Ground-Motion Transfer Function Matrix Between Two Nearby Rock and Soil Sites: A System Identification Problem
A Ground-Motion Transfer Function Matrix Between Two Nearby Rock and Soil Sites: A System Identification Problem
A Ground-Motion Transfer Function Matrix Between Two Nearby Rock and Soil Sites: A System Identification Problem
1785/0120090323
Abstract
Introduction
Site effects, or the effects of local site conditions on
ground motion, are often estimated from the ratio of seismic
spectra recorded at a particular location, generally on soil,
with that recorded at a reference station, generally on rock.
The spectra contain both the effect of the earthquake source
and any scattering along its propagation path to the recording
site. An implicit condition of this approach is that the distance between the soil site and the reference station must
be much smaller than the hypocentral distance so that the
source and paths effects are essentially the same for both
sites and, hence, removed by the ratio.
Generally, the ratios are computed for the corresponding
components of motion at both sites (e.g., Borcherdt, 1970;
King and Tucker, 1984). Other authors have used horizontalon-soil-to-vertical-on-soil ratios (Lermo and Chvez-Garca,
1993) and horizontal-on-soil-to-vertical-on-rock ratios
(Lachet and Bard, 1994). Generally, the ratios are computed
by taking time windows of the soil and rock records, usually
centered around the maximum S-wave amplitude, computing
Fourier spectra, and dividing their absolute values. Another
approach using only data from a single station has been introduced by Nakamura (1989) that estimates ground-motion
A Ground-Motion Transfer Function Matrix between Two Nearby Rock and Soil Sites
Figure 1.
223
Figure 2. Hypocenter distribution of earthquakes occurred in the period from 1999 to 2007, of magnitudes between 3 and 6, and of
depths larger than 20 km. The small rectangle covers the Wellington area shown in Figure 1, and the large rectangle depicts the epicentral
distribution area from which the earthquakes for this study were selected.
224
Table 1
Description of Soils underneath Each of the Strong-Motion Network Sites in
the WellingtonLower Hutt Area Used in This Study
Soil Type and Thickness (m)
Station*
V S30 (m=s)
PGMS
LHUS
PHFS
EBPS
INSS
ARKS
LHES
LHRS
POTS
TFSS
WNKS
WEL
FKPS
MISS
10
10
515
10
60
35
20
15
200
100150
295
195
212
10
5
10
<1
40
5
50
2
10
12
10
12
0
230
145
20
9
40
280
10
0
150
50
2
30
61
541
453
130
632
268
628
266
*Locations of stations are shown in Fig. 1. INSS and POTS are reference sites, on rock.
Unit A, gravelly sand with shells, also silty clay (alluvium); B, blue silty clay (marine); C,
gravel; D, Wildford marine; E, basal gravel; F, greywacke bedrock.
The values of V S30 (i.e., the S-wave velocity at 30 m depth) are given for most sites, for
completeness. From John Louie, personal commun., 2007.
From Martha Savage, personal commun., 2007.
A Ground-Motion Transfer Function Matrix between Two Nearby Rock and Soil Sites
pairs of ground-motion components at each frequency.
Although Tumarkin (1998) states that the matrix elements
can be obtained from the maximum likelihood solution of
an overdetermined system of equations, he does not elaborate
on the inversion scheme and directly presents his results of
applying the method to data from the downhole array in
Garner Valley, southern California. On the other hand,
Paolucci (1999) calculates the elements of the transfer function matrix for two generic cases, a free-surface topography
and a cylindrical valley, each with a prescribed set of elastic
parameters and geometry. In each, he computes the ground
motion due to each of three perpendicular input motions
and the corresponding transfer matrix elements using the
outputs to each of those input motions. In addition, he convolves the synthetic transfer matrix with real accelerograms
recorded on different types of stiff soils and rock and performs
a comparative study with the corresponding standard spectral
ratios. Paolucci (1999) concludes that the cross-coupling
terms cause dispersion of the site response, introducing peak
values that could be interpreted as resonances if calculated
with the standard spectral ratios.
In the present study, we presume no prior knowledge of
the local geology of the site and elaborate an inversion
scheme based on the stochastic inverse (Franklin, 1970;
Aki and Richards, 1980), to compute a 3D transfer function
of ground motion, conveying the coupling of the three com-
225
Method
Let s f and r f represent the frequency domain
ground-motion vectors at a soil site and a nearby rock site,
respectively, at frequency f. If Gij , i; j 1; 2; 3 is the
transfer function between the wave motion in the direction
j at the rock site and the wave motion in the direction i
at the soil site, the most general linear relationship among
the three components of the two vectors is:
Figure 5. The elements of the G matrix for station PGMS. The black lines correspond to the solutions with the stochastic inversion
scheme described in the text, and the gray lines correspond to the solutions obtained by a simple least-squares inversion of the simultaneous
system of equation (2). The latter tends to produce larger values for all components of G through most of the frequency range.
226
(1)
s1
1
B 1
Bs
@ 2
s1
3
0
s2
1
s3
1
s2
2
s3
2
s2
3
s3
3
G11
B
@ G21
G31
G12
G22
G32
sN
1
C
C
sN
2 A
sN
3
10 1
r1
G13
CB
B
G23 A@ r1
2
G33
r1
3
r2
1
r3
1
r2
2
r3
2
r2
3
r3
3
rN
1
C
C (2)
rN
2 A
rN
3
or
s Gr;
(3)
Figure 6. Comparison of the G matrix elements of stations LHUS (solid line) and PHFS (dash-dotted line). The corresponding
values are similar up to about 3 Hz and depart dramatically for higher frequencies, suggesting the effect of the weathered greywacke directly
underneath PHFS.
A Ground-Motion Transfer Function Matrix between Two Nearby Rock and Soil Sites
to earthquake. For our analysis, we have selected seismograms with a signal-to-noise ratio of at least 4=1. For each
frequency, the variability of amplitudes from earthquake to
earthquake can be measured by the covariance matrix of the
three components of motion. Let and be the covariance
matrices
0
1
11 12 13
(4)
@ 21 22 23 A
31 32 33
0
11
@ 21
31
12
22
32
1
13
23 A
33
227
(5)
(6)
Figure 7. Comparison of the G matrix elements at stations LHES (solid line) and LHRS (dash-dotted line), both located at each side of
the Wellington fault on thick, soft soil and weathered rock, respectively.
228
1=2 k0
Rr R G S1
s Rr1=2 rk0
s S S
Data
or
G1 0 sk0 rk0 ;
(7)
(8)
where
We can arrange equation (8) into a form similar to equation (2) to obtain the matrix equation
G1 0 s0 r0
(9)
with G1 , sk , and rk are now expressed in the primed
variables.
From equation (8), the stochastic inverse is given by
G1 0 r0 s0 r0 r0 s0 s0 s0 r0 1 :
(10)
We compute G1 by transforming G1 0 back to the original variables using the transformation in equation (7) and
finally find G G1 1 .
Figure 8. Comparison of the G matrix elements at stations TFSS (solid line) and MISS (dash-dotted line), both on reclaimed soil but
showing distinctive site effects.
A Ground-Motion Transfer Function Matrix between Two Nearby Rock and Soil Sites
p
where i 1 and 2f. In a few cases where the
P-wave arrival was not clear, we used the delay in S-wave
arrival since tS tP for nearly vertical incidence. In general, we find that t is of the order of 0.01 s for earthquakes
with epicenters in the region between the large and small
squares of Figure 2. For epicenters inside the smaller square,
the delays are negligible and we have not incorporated the
time shift. We emphasize that the time windows chosen for
analysis must exclude surface waves or any nondirect body
waves arriving at the soil and reference stations.
The orientations of the horizontal components at all stations used in this study are referred to the geographical
northeast coordinates, with index 1 for the north component
of motion, index 2 for the east component, and index 3 for
the vertical component (positive up). The sampling time interval is 0.01 s; and, because the seismograms recorded at
each station are, in general, of different duration, we have
either increased their duration (by adding zeros) or truncated
them all to the same duration of 40.96 s, sampled by 4096
time points. The mean has been removed from all seismograms, and we have chosen time windows that include the
P and S wave arrivals but omit surface and coda waves.
Generally, these windows are between 10 and 15 seconds,
as shown in Figure 4 for an earthquake recorded at stations
INSS (rock) and LHUS (soil). We have band-pass filtered the
229
Results
Figure 5 shows the absolute values of the nine components of G for station PGMS, using INSS (on rock) as the
reference site (Fig. 1). The calculations are in the frequency
domain for up to 15 Hz, using the stochastic inverse (black
line) and a simple least-squares inversion numerical scheme
(gray line). In the latter case, the presence of noise in the
signals biases the variability of the response (Aki and
Richards, 1980, p. 637), resulting in a grossly overestimation
of the amplitude of the response (the glitches below 1 Hz
also reflect the instability of the algorithm due to the lowfrequency deficiency of the weak motion).
Strictly speaking, the G matrix maps the three-component motion vector at the rock site into the three-component
vector describing the motion at the soil site. The values of
the off-diagonal terms depend not only on the spectral
amplitudes of the corresponding components but also on the
angles of the motion with respect to the measurement (usually geographic) coordinates. They define the symmetry of the
Figure 9. Comparison of the G matrix elements at station WEL (solid line), on an elevated topography of greywacke weathered at the
top, and WNKS (dash-dotted line), on thin soil 520 m thick over rock, surrounded by topographic features.
230
motion between the soil and the reference rock sites, respectively. To estimate the maximum response, we first compute
the principal values and directions (axes) of each Gre and
Gim . Then, we add these principal values in groups of two
(nine vector values) to obtain a single matrix S. The principal
values and axes of S determine an upper bound on amplification and the corresponding direction of the relative motion
between soil and rock. This must be done for each frequency.
Because G is nonsymmetric, in general, we use singular
value decomposition (SVD) to find the principal values and
directions of matrices Gre and Gim . These, in turn, determine
the principal vectors sre j and sim j, j 1; 2; 3 for Gre and
Gim , respectively. The matrix S is constructed by adding
these principal vectors:
Si; j
q
s2re i s2im j 2 cosij ;
(11)
Figure 10.
A Ground-Motion Transfer Function Matrix between Two Nearby Rock and Soil Sites
231
Figure 12.
Horizontal motion ellipses for prescribed frequencies 1.51 Hz (black), 2 Hz (blue), and 3 Hz (orange) at all stations.
Below are the corresponding amplification factors, written with
colors corresponding to each ellipse.
232
Figure 13. The left column shows the principal values Gp (black line) and Gq (gray line) for the stations listed at the far right. The right
column shows the mean value of the horizontal standard spectral ratios SRh (solid line) and the corresponding standard deviation (dashed
lines) for the same stations.
of Gp (black line) and Gq (gray line). The comparison shows
that, for stations PGMS, LHUS, and PHFS, Gp exhibits
similar variability to the corresponding mean spectral ratio
with frequency. This is not the case for LHES, ARKS,
A Ground-Motion Transfer Function Matrix between Two Nearby Rock and Soil Sites
Conclusions
In this article, we have introduced a method based on the
stochastic inverse to compute a 3D representation of the
effects of the local site conditions on ground motion. This
representation is a 3 3 complex matrix, or transfer matrix
function G whose elements transform the three components
of the ground motion recorded at a reference rock site into
the three components of motion at a soil site, in the frequency
domain. G is derived from an overdetermined system of
simultaneous equations formed with the unknown elements
of G and the three-component complex spectra of many
different earthquakes recorded at both the soil and rock sites.
We used a total of 25 earthquakes for our analysis (only five
of which were of M 5 or larger). The earthquakes were
selected hypocenters distributed over a wide azimuthal range
but such that the angle of incidence is vertical, or near
vertical, at both the soil and rock reference stations. These
conditions help ensure that a variety of different polarizations
are present, which stabilizes the inversion. Within the linear
regime, the elements of the G matrix converge to constant
values as the number of earthquakes used in the inversion
is increased.
For the cases treated in this work, we used data from 25
earthquakes per station in the inversion. Adding the data
from M 34 earthquakes makes negligible difference to
the G matrix estimates above 2 Hz. The availability of a number of earthquakes with magnitude greater than M 5 would
modify the results in the low-frequency range (< 0:5 Hz) due
to their capability of exciting the low-frequency modes of
the basin.
Using the G matrix, we have determined the local site
effects at the recording sites of the permanent strong ground
motion network in the WMA. The results show that the
maximum amplification factors occur at different frequencies
and in different orientations, depending on the site location.
The overall orientation of the maximum motion in the Wellington area is northeastsouthwest. In general, at any given
frequency, the amplifications and maximum orientations are
highly variable, even where sites are close together. This
suggests a strong dependency of the G matrix on the geometry of the near-surface geological heterogeneity that produces
the amplification.
In some cases the frequency behavior of Gp is similar to
that of the corresponding mean horizontal spectral ratio, SRh ,
while in other the behaviors are different. The differences are
explained by the extent to which the response at the soil site
depends on the polarization of the input motion at the rock
site. Sites with symmetric geometry will produce a
symmetric G matrix that will have only diagonal terms in
a particular coordinate system. In this situation the magnitude of the diagonal terms will be the same as the standard
spectral ratios, and linearly polarized input motion at the rock
site will produce a linearly polarized response at the soil site.
Although we have calculated our results for up to 15 Hz,
their validity may be questionable beyond 5 Hz, in the light
233
Acknowledgments
The authors express their gratitude to John Haines for valuable discussions at the start of this project, as well as to Russell Robinson and Terry
Webb for their time dedicated to improve the quality of this manuscript. The
authors are indebted to Francisco Chvez-Garca, Roberto Paolucci, and Stefano Parolai, an associate editor of BSSA, whose critical comments have
been crucial to clarify the concepts involved in this work. Our gratitude
is also extended to the staff of the Lido Cafe (Wellington) who graciously
hosted our endless discussions on the subject.
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GNS Science
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Manuscript received 2 November 2009