Effect of style of faulting on the probabilistic characterization of directionality of horizontal response spectral ordinates

Abstract

Horizontal earthquake ground motions exhibit substantial changes in amplitude with changes in orientation. While the effects of style of faulting on central tendency measures of ground motion intensity such as RotD50 are well established in ground motion models, less attention has been given to how faulting mechanism influences the complete directional characteristics of ground motions. This study addresses this gap by conducting a comprehensive probabilistic characterization of ground motion directionality for strike-slip and reverse-slip earthquakes using 3,862 records with moment magnitudes greater than five. Two directionality parameters were examined across 58 oscillator periods ranging from 0.01 to 10 s. The directionality parameters examined consist of pseudo-acceleration response spectral ordinates at all non-redundant orientations normalized by either RotD100 or RotD50 intensities (denoted as η and ν, respectively). Nonlinear regression was used to develop mechanism-specific models for the geometric mean, logarithmic standard deviations, and full probability distributions of these parameters. Results show that strike-slip earthquakes exhibit notably different directionality compared to reverse-slip earthquakes, particularly at longer periods. Strike-slip earthquakes are, on average, 1% to 44% more polarized than reverse-slip earthquakes at periods above 0.5 s, and have RotD100/RotD50 ratios that are 1% to 3.7% larger. The developed models enable engineers and engineering seismologists to obtain mechanism-specific estimates of pseudo-acceleration response spectral ordinates at specific orientations, for applications such as regional seismic risk assessments and orientation-specific probabilistic seismic hazard analyses.