Deep Borehole Instrumentation Along San Francisco Bay Bridges: 1996 - 2003 and Strong Ground Motion Systhesis Along the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge

As a result of collaboration between the Berkeley Seismographic Station, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Caltrans, instrument packages have been placed in bedrock in six boreholes and two surface sites along the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge. Since 1996 over 200 local earthquakes have been recorded. Prior to this study few seismic recording instruments existed in bed-rock in San Francisco Bay. We utilized the data to perform analysis of ground motion variability, wave passage, site response, and up-and down-hole wave propagation along the Bay Bridge. We also synthesized strong ground motion at nine locations along the Bay Bridge. Key to these studies is LLNL's effort to exploit the information available in weak ground motions (generally from earthquakes < M=4.0) to enhance predictions of seismic hazards. We found that Yerba Island has no apparent site response at the surface relative to a borehole site. The horizontal to vertical spectral ratio method best revealed no site response, while the complex signal spectral ratio method had the lowest variance for spectral ratios and best predicted surface recordings when the borehole recording was used as input. Both methods identified resonances at about the same frequencies. Regional attenuation results in a significant loss of high frequencies in both surface and borehole recordings. Records are band limited at near 3 Hz. Therefore a traditional rock outcrop site response, flat to high frequency in displacement, is not available. We applied a methodology to predict and synthesize strong ground motion along the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge from a M=7.25 earthquake along the Hayward fault, about12 km distant. We synthesized for three-components and broad-band (0.0-25.0 Hz) ground motion accelerations, velocities, and displacements. We examined two different possible rupture scenarios, a ''mean'' and ''one standard deviation'' model. We combined the high frequency calculations (Hz > 0.7) based on empirical Green's functions with finite difference calculations for frequencies less than 0.7 Hz. We found that in the near-source region, far-field shear-wave generation and near-field tectonic ground displacements can result in very large long period ground displacements and velocity pulses. Far-field arrivals have the strongest energy in periods of about 2 to 5 s, and near-field arrivals have the strongest energy in periods of about 5 to 10 s. Much of these near-source ground motions would not be observed by conventional strong motion recording systems, which typically are high-pass band limited at 2-5 s periods, and therefore have not been included as standard practice structural input ground motions. For some fault rupture scenarios, the large tectonic displacement pulse would initially drive the bridge with motions parallel to tectonic fault displacement, and before the bridge would start to rebound, the far-field S-wave would arrive and drive the bridge in the opposite direction. This type of multiple long-period modal response can occur in other long period structures such as base-isolated systems and tall buildings