PEER Strong Ground Motion Database
Latest PEER Strong Motion Database web site
Modern approaches to assessing facility performance rely on good information about likely ground shaking at the site. Many improvements have been made in providing this information in the past several decades. Access to earthquake ground motion data has been hampered, however, by difficult access to the large body of data as well as by the inconsistency in how the data are gathered and stored.
Recognizing the need to improve access to earthquake ground motion data, PEER embarked on an effort to create a web-based, searchable database of strong ground motion data. The first step was to collect the most important ground motion records from around the world. The next step was to ensure that all the data had been processed consistently and that it was reliable in all regards. The next step was to gather related metadata such as earthquake magnitude, various site-to-source distance measures, style of faulting, local site conditions at the recording stations, and other relevant engineering parameters. Finally, PEER created the online database to make all the information available to the public.
In its completed form, the latest PEER Strong Motion Database, brings together over 10,000 strong ground motion records from 173 different earthquakes in a web-accessible format. An effort is underway to maintain the PEER strong motion database and adding records and metadata as they become available. Since some researchers have used the previous version of PEER strong-motion database (with much smaller number of records than the NGA database), a link to the old PEER database is also kept from this page.
The PEER Strong Ground Motion Database is serving a number of useful purposes. Two important examples are:
- - Earthquake engineers need strong ground motion data to analyze computer models of buildings, bridges, and other facilities. The PEER Strong Ground Motion database has proved to be very popular among engineers who increasingly are using it for selection and modification of records for analysis and design studies. The database is now cited as a primary source of ground motion records in the latest revision of the Building Seismic Safety Council’s NEHRP Recommended Provisions.
- - The database is also being used to develop improved attenuation relations — such models provide quantitative information on how strong the shaking will be at a site as a function of earthquake magnitude, fault mechanism, site-to-source distance, local site conditions, among other parameters. A major PEER project, Next Generation Attenuation Models (NGA), is bringing together the major developers of attenuation relations from around the U.S. to develop the next-generation of attenuation relations. For latest reports on NGA models, please go to peer.berkeley.edu/NGA.
The PEER Strong Motion database was enhanced in 2005-2007 with the addition of strong motion and site data from Italy. The data is from shallow crustal earthquakes, principally on normal faults, a condition that had previously been sparsely represented in the PEER database. The size of the Italian recording database has increased by an order of magnitude and the data are all uniformly processed by Pacific Engineering and Analysis. A site database for Italian recording stations has also been generated, and includes SASW measurements from Dr. Robert Kayen of USGS from 2006. The PI for this work is Jonathan Stewart of UCLA, with assistance from Giuseppe Scasserra and Professor Giuseppe Lanzo from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. The data is available at http://peer.berkeley.edu/lifelines/research_projects/3A02/.