Ambient noise measurements on soil and buildings

Abstract

This special issue of the Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering contains 13 paper devoted to ambient noise measurements on soil and buildings. Five of the paper are the outcome of a NATO Science for Peace Project named “Assessment of Seismic Site Amplification and Seismic Building Vulnerability in the FYR Macedonia, Croatia and Slovenia” whose aim was to bring together geologist, seismologist and engineers and perform field measurement of dynamic characteristics of large sets of buildings and their foundation soils, trying to integrate interpreted measurement data into microzonation maps of urban areas. Around this core I collected other papers by authors that were invited to participate to project meetings and to another initiative that stemmed out of the project, that is a NATO Advanced Research Workshop entitled “Increasing Seismic Safety by Combining Engineering Technologies and Seismological Data”. The ARW produced also a book (Mucciarelli et al. 2009) that provided a detailed state of the art and new ideas for the future, making it a complement to this special issue devoted to original experimental and numerical results. Two papers of this issue were later contributed by authors that became aware of the initiative and decided that their work was fit in this framework, confirming the ongoing interest on this subject. The papers cover issues starting from the classical use of microtremors to study soil properties (Herak et al. 2010; Gosar and Lenart 2010) consider new theoretical models of seismic noise (Albarello and Lunedei 2010), discuss the stability of noise measurement to invert velocity profiles (Endrun et al. 2010) and include the study of possible resonance between soil and structures (Gosar et al. 2010). To this last aim, the knowledge of the dynamic properties of building is essential. It is very interesting that two independent papers, one from the SfP project (Gallipoli 2010) and one submitted later (Oliveira and Navarro 2010) came to the same conclusion analysing different sets of building in different countries: the period