Effect of site-specific soil nonlinearities and uncertainties on ground motion intensity measures and structural demand parameters

This paper investigates the effects of site-specific uncertainties in soil strength and stiffness parameters on the commonly used ground motion intensity measures and the resulting engineering demand parameters of moment resisting frames of varying heights at a site in Los Angeles, California. Through a detailed site-specific uncertainty analysis, comparison with generic data, and an extensive parametric study, it is shown that underestimation or overestimation of the true soil uncertainties could significantly affect both the average values and variabilities of the Arias intensity and PGA, and that the uncertainty in the soil strength parameter has more profound effect on the intensity measures than the uncertainty in the soil stiffness parameter. It is also shown that depending upon the natural period of a structure, the uncertainty in both the soil strength and stiffness parameters could affect its peak floor acceleration and peak inter-story drift. Moreover, it is observed that the structure amplifies the soil uncertainty more than the seismological uncertainty.