Effects of rotation motions on strong-motion data

Rotation motion and its effects on strong-motion data, in most cases, are much smaller than that of translational motion and have been ignored in most analyses of strong-motion data. However, recent observations from near-fault and/or extreme large ground motions suggest that these effects might be underestimated and quantitative analyses seem to be necessary for improving our understating of these effects. Rotation motion-related effects include centrifugal acceleration, the effects of gravity and effects of the rotation frame. Detailed analyses of these effects based on the observed data are unavailable in the literature. In this study, we develop a numerical algorithm for estimating the effects of rotational motion on the strong-motion data using a set of six-component ground motions and apply it to a set of rotation rate-strong motion velocity data. The data were recorded during a magnitude 6.9 earthquake. The peak value of the derived acceleration and rotation rate of this dataset are about 186 cm/s/s and 0.0026 rad/s. Numerical analyses of data gives time histories of these rotational motion-related effects. Our results show that all the rotation angles are less than 0.01°. The maximum centrifugal acceleration, effect from gravity and effect of the rotation frame are about 0.03 and 0.14 cm/s/s, respectively. Both these two effects are much smaller than the peak acceleration 186 cm/s/s. This result might have been expected because our data are not near-field and wave motions are expected to be nearly plane waves. However, it is worth noticing that the centrifugal acceleration is underestimated and a small rotational effect can cause large waveform difference in acceleration data. The waveform difference before and after the correction for rotational motion can reach 16 cm/s/s (about 10 %).