Vertical ground-motion prediction equation and the vertical-to-horizontal spectral ratio for crustal earthquakes in Taiwan

Abstract

We develop a ground motion prediction equation (GMPE) for estimating the vertical ground motion amplitudes for crustal earthquakes in Taiwan. The data set used for the development includes strong-motion recordings mainly from Taiwan earthquakes (M3.5–7.6) and supplemented with large-magnitude earthquakes (M6.5–7.9) from other regions in the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) next generation attenuation (NGA)-West2 database. The functional form of the GMPE is similar to that of Phung et al. developed for the horizontal component (P20). The GMPE provides median and standard deviations of peak ground acceleration (PGA) and 5% damped pseudo spectral acceleration response ordinates of the orientation-independent average horizontal component of ground motion (RotD50) for the spectral period of 0.01–10 s. The vertical ground motion developed in this study can be paired with the P20 horizontal component model to estimate a vertical-to-horizontal (V/H) ratio that is unbiased. In the vertical component, we observe significant nonlinear site effects in the period of about 0.2–0.5 s, moderate nonlinear site effects in the period of about 0.01–0.04 s, and small nonlinear site effects in the period of about 0.05–0.075 s. Compared to our horizontal GMPE, anelastic attenuation is faster, VS30-scaling is reduced, and nonlinear site response is weaker for the vertical component.