Introduction to the Focus Section on Validation of the SCEC Broadband Platform V14.3 Simulation Methods

Abstract

This Special Focus Section comprises a collection of eight papers describing recent advances in methods for the broadband simulation of earthquake ground motions and their evaluation against recorded data and empirical models. In the jargon of engineering seismology, “broadband” implies seismograms with periods ranging from less than 0.1 s to greater than 10 s. Broadband simulations are of scientific and engineering interest because they provide complete time histories that can be useful in ground‐motion forecasting, especially for parameter ranges that are poorly sampled by observed seismograms. The papers in this collection document a coordinated exercise, conducted by the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) in collaboration with the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center, which takes important steps toward validating broadband simulation methods for engineering purposes. The exercise was driven by two major hazard modeling efforts, the South Western United States (SWUS) ground‐motion characterization project and the PEER Next Generation Attenuation project for central and eastern North America (NGA‐East). Both projects require simulations to supplement observations for constraining ground‐motion prediction equations (GMPEs) and characterizing their epistemic uncertainties. The first paper, by Goulet et al. (2015), describes the objectives and design of the study. The validations were done in two parts: against …