Analysis and simulation of strong earthquake ground motions using ARMA models

The acceleration record of an earthquake ground motion is a nonstationary process with both amplitude and frequency content varying in time. The paper presents a general procedure for the analysis and simulation of strong earthquake ground motions based on parametric ARMA models. Structural design spectra are based on smoothed linear response spectra obtained from different events scaled by their peak values. Such an approach does not incorporate other characteristics of the excitation represented by measured data. This study investigate the use of nonstationary models which can be considered characteristic and representative of specific historical earthquakes. An earthquake record is regarded as a sample realization from a population of such samples, which could have been generated by the stochastic process characterized by an Autoregressive Moving Average (ARMA) model. This model is capable of reproducing the nonstationary amplitude as well as the frequency content of the earthquake ground accelerations. The moving time-window technique is applied to synthesize the near field earthquakes, Boumerdes-1, Boumerdes -2, and Boumerdes -3 2003 recorded on dense soils in Algeria. This model, is based on a low-order, time-invariant ARMA process excited by Gaussian white noise and amplitude modulated using a simple envelope function to account for the non-stationary characteristics. This simple model gives a reasonable fit to the observed ground motion. It is shown that the selected ARMA (2,1) model and the algorithm used for generating the accelerograms are able to preserve the features of the real earthquake records with different frequency content. In this evaluation, the linear and non linear responses of a given soil layer have been adopted. This study suggests the ability to characterize the earthquake by a minimum number of parameters.