Engineering Ground-Motion Parameters Attenuation Relationships for Greece

Abstract

Engineering ground-motion parameters can be used to describe the dam- age potential of an earthquake. Some of them correlate well with several commonly used demand measures of structural performance, liquefaction, and seismic-slope stability. The importance of these parameters comes from the necessity of an alter- native measure to the earthquake intensity. In the proposed new attenuation relation- ship we consider peak values of strong motion, spectral acceleration, elastic input energy at selected frequencies, root-mean-square acceleration, Arias intensity, char- acteristic intensity, Fajfar index, cumulative absolute velocity, cumulative absolute velocity integrated with a 5 cm/sec 2 lower threshold, and spectrum-intensity energy. This article describes the steps involved in the development of new attenuation re- lationships for all the preceding parameters, using all existing, up-to-date Greek strong-motion data. The functional form of the empirical equation is selected based on a theoretical model, and the coefficients of the independent variables are deter- mined by employing mixed effects regression analysis methodologies.