Technical Studies

Suites of Earthquake Ground Motions for Analysis of Steel Moment Frame Structures

Task 5.4.1


As part of the System Performance Team, Woodward-Clyde Federal Services of Pasadena, California has developed several suites of ground motions to be used for analyses of model buildings located in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Boston. These acceleration time histories include records from historic earthquakes as well as artificially-generated time histories based on modeling of the rupture process and wave propagation through the soil strata.

The final report outlining the development of these ground motions is currently in review, but we are making a draft report available now along with all the horizontal acceleration time histories for those who need to use them for analyses within the SAC project. Note that the naming convention used in these files corresponds to the SAC designation - see the index of records corresponding to each set of motions for cross-references between the SAC names and the original ground motion names. The vertical acceleration time histories will be made available soon.

There are eleven files currently available:

All of these files are archived using the zip scheme. Programs to unzip such files are widely available; the WWW site http://www.cdrom.com/pub/infozip/unzip.html contains executables for most common platforms.


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