Research Information System
NEAR SURFACE GEOPHYSICS, vol.1, no.2, pp.95-101, 2003 (SCI-Expanded)
The Duzce (Turkey) earthquake, which struck on 12th November 1999, caused serious damage and loss of life in the town of Duzce, 8 km from the Duzce fault. However, the strong-motion records indicate that the peak acceleration values were almost twice as high in the town of BOW, 34 km from the epicentre, compared with those in Duzce. In the earthquake-affected region, the peak acceleration values are not well correlated with the damage to buildings. For this reason, the use of Fourier spectra leads to some confusion when comparing the quality of the civil engineering work carried out in Duzce and in Bolu. Fourier spectra provide a complete description of amplitudes versus frequency, but they do not contain information about the dynamic characteristics of waveforms. This difficulty may be overcome by considering the time-duration effect of an earthquake, which is the main cause of damage to buildings. The Stockwell transform of acceleration records offers a means of representing the variation of spectral components with time. This makes possible an unambiguous visualization of the time-duration effect of an earthquake and consequently an easy correlation of strong-motion records with damage to structures.