Estimating coseismic deformations from near source strong motion records: methods and case studies

Digital strong-motion accelerographs have opened up the possibility of extracting ground motion characteristics at much lower frequencies than was offered by analogue instruments. High-quality digital data obtained close to the faults have tempted several efforts to retrieve permanent ground displacements after an earthquake. Such attempts have been partly successful, and somewhat subjective, the main reason being the presence of baseline offsets in the accelerometric data. We review existing methods for such applications, discuss their limitations and propose a more objective and improved scheme to make baseline adjustments and obtain permanent displacements. The proposed technique is applied to 26 digital recordings from the 29 May 2008 Ölfus Earthquake in South Iceland and 9 recordings from the 1999 Chi-Chi, Taiwan, Earthquake, and the permanent displacements obtained are compared with published results and GPS measurements from nearby stations. Our case studies show that the proposed technique, in addition to being simple and objective, is effective in making adjustments for baseline errors in accelerometric data.