Evaluation of Peak Ground Velocity as a “Good” Intensity Measure for Near-Source Ground Motions

This paper investigates the “goodness” of peak ground velocity as a dependable intensity measure for the earthquake shaking of civil structures. The paper stresses the importance of distinguishing between acceleration pulses and velocity pulses, and identifies two classes of near-source ground motions: those where the peak ground velocity is the integral of a distinguishable acceleration pulse and those where the peak ground velocity is the result of a succession of high-frequency, one-sided acceleration spikes. It is shown that the shaking induced by the former class is in general much more violent than the shaking induced by the latter class of motions even when motions that belong to the former class may be generated by significantly smaller-magnitude earthquakes. Building on the dimensional analysis introduced in the companion papers this paper shows that both linear and nonlinear structural responses from a variety of records which exhibit distinguishable pulses scale better with the peak pulse accel...