Ia. Beresnev et al., SOURCE, PATH AND SITE EFFECTS ON DOMINANT FREQUENCY AND SPATIAL VARIATION OF STRONG GROUND MOTION RECORDED BY SMART1 AND SMART2 ARRAYS IN TAIWAN, Earthquake engineering & structural dynamics, 23(6), 1994, pp. 583-597
The reduction in spatial variance of strong ground motion with increas
ing earthquake magnitude has been reported recently. However, we show
that the observed dependence of spatial variance on magnitude is its i
mplicit dependence on the frequency content (dominant frequency) of th
e wave field. Time-domain cross-correlations of pairs of accelerograms
are used to quantify the spatial variations in this paper. Magnitude
is one of the factors contributing to the dominant frequency. We attem
pt to study separately the effects of magnitude, hypocentral distance,
peak ground acceleration and focal depth on the dominant frequency in
order to find the most significant one. The data base consists of 196
5 records of horizontal acceleration from 148 local earthquakes in Tai
wan. The analysis shows the overwhelming effect of the source magnitud
e on the formation of the dominant frequency with an empirical relatio
nship: f(D)(Hz) = 19.9 - 2.84M(L) +/- 1.93 for 3.1 less-than-or-equal-
to M(L) less-than-or-equal-to 7.0 No significant effect of hypocentral
distance, local acceleration amplitude or depth is detected for all t
heir values available (up to 170 km, 250 cm/s2, and 100 km, respective
ly). The prevailing effect of magnitude on the dominant frequency is a
real cause of the consistently observed reduction of spatial variance
of ground motion with increasing magnitude of earthquakes.