Review of site effect modeling methods considering experimental geophysical data

Abstract

It is well known that seismic waves are affected by the geological nature of the different layers in which they propagate close to the surface. The various structural and topographic elements cause the incident signal to be reflected, refracted, or diffracted. As a result, the combination of those different waves modifies the spatial, spectral, and temporal characteristics of the wavefield. These phenomena are called site effects. Especially amplifications of the ground motion acceleration is observed, which may induce failure of the structures located on the surface, as well as slope instabilities. The spatial variability of the ground motion can be very significant over small distances, because of the changes in the geometry and the soil conditions. During the last years, many research works have been conducted through numerical simulations on simplified slope geometries in order to identify the effect of geological, topographic and input signal parameters on the amplification of the amplitude of seismic waves. However, the predictions resulting from the numerical simulations are often different from the field observations. So, this paper firstly presents an in-depth literature review about available methods to model site effects and their implications. Secondly, it also focused on results of existing works that benefit from experimental data in the analytical modeling; more especially works considering geophysical data obtained through H/V and MASW experiments are examined. © 2020 European Association for Structural Dynamics. All rights reserved.