Validation of the SCEC Broadband Platform V14.3 Simulation Methods Using Pseudospectral Acceleration Data

Online Material: Figures showing bias of PSA between data and simulations and between GMPEs and simulations for validation events and scenarios. This article summarizes the evaluation of ground‐motion simulation methods implemented on the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) Broadband Platform (BBP), version 14.3 (as of March 2014). A seven‐member panel, the authorship of this article, was formed to evaluate those methods for the prediction of pseudospectral accelerations (PSAs) of ground motion. The panel’s mandate was to evaluate the methods using tools developed through the validation exercise (Goulet et al. , 2015) and to define validation metrics for the assessment of the methods’ performance. This article summarizes the evaluation process and conclusions from the panel. The five broadband, finite‐source simulation methods on the BBP include two deterministic approaches herein referred to as CSM (Anderson, 2015) and UCSB (Crempien and Archuleta, 2015); a band‐limited stochastic white noise method called EXSIM (Atkinson and Assatourians, 2015); and two hybrid approaches, referred to as G&P (Graves and Pitarka, 2015) and SDSU (Olsen and Takedatsu, 2015), which utilize a deterministic Green’s function approach for periods longer than 1 s and stochastic methods for periods shorter than 1 s. Two acceptance tests were defined to validate the broadband finite‐source ground‐motion simulation methods (Goulet et al. , 2015). Part A compared observed and simulated PSAs for periods from 0.01 to 10 s for 12 moderate‐to‐large earthquakes located in California, Japan, and the eastern United States. Part B compared the median simulated PSAs with published Next Generation Attenuation‐West 1 (NGA‐West 1) (Abrahamson and Silva, 2008; Boore and Atkinson, 2008; Campbell and Bozorgnia, 2008; Chiou and Youngs, 2008) ground‐motion prediction equations (GMPEs) for specific magnitude and distance cases, using a pass–fail criterion based on a defined acceptable range around the spectral shape of the GMPEs. For the initial part A and part …