Extracting rotational components of earthquake ground motion using data recorded at multiple stations

Rotational components of earthquake ground motion have not been considered for seismic analysis, design and performance assessment because recordings of these components are unavailable. A number of procedures have been proposed to extract rotational components of ground motion from translational time series recorded at multiple, closely spaced recording stations. In this paper, a new procedure that is capable of capturing higher frequency content in rotational time‐series is presented. The frequencies at which numerical errors are introduced in the solution, which are a function of apparent wave velocity and array dimension, are identified. Results are presented for the proposed procedure, the widely accepted geodetic method, and a single‐station procedure developed by the authors, all using data recorded at the Lotung array in Taiwan. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.