Joint Time Frequency Analysis Based Synthesis of Acceleration-Time History and Response Spectra for Japanese Earthquakes

Abstract

Time–Frequency Analysis (TFA) techniques help to obtain the ideal time and frequency occurrence characteristics of earthquake motion confined in a seismic recorded signal. Time-histories from recording stations in Japan has been adopted in the present analysis, considering a large number of available data. The seismograms were transformed using Gabor transform, a Linear Joint TFA method, to assess their frequency content by generating their Gabor coefficients. Average Gabor coefficients were estimated for recorded seismograms within a magnitude range of 5.5–6.0 and hypocentral distances ranging from 0 to 50 km. The estimated average Gabor coefficients were used to synthesize a generalized acceleration-time history for the specific distance and magnitude ranges using Gabor Expansion, without compromising the frequency content of the waves. Additionally, it is demonstrated that the response spectra of the synthesized signal and the original signal match very well. These response spectra will be valuable for the nonlinear investigation of structures in this region. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.