SCEC Broadband Platform Strong Ground Motion Simulations

The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) Broadband Platform is a collaborative software development project involving SCEC researchers, graduate students, and the SCEC Community Modeling Environment. The goal of the SCEC Broadband Simulation Platform is to generate broadband (0-10 Hz) ground motions for earthquakes using deterministic low-frequency and stochastic high-frequency simulations. SCEC developers have integrated complex scientific modules for rupture generation, low-frequency deterministic seismogram synthesis, high-frequency stochastic seismogram synthesis, and non-linear site effects calculation into a system that supports easy on-demand computation of broadband seismograms. The SCEC Broadband platform has two primary modes of operation, validation mode, and scenario mode. In validation mode, the earthquake modeling software calculates broadband seismograms for one of three earthquakes, Northridge, Loma Prieta, or Landers at sites with observed strong motion data. Then, the platform calculates goodness of fit measurements that quantify how well the model-based broadband seismograms match the observed seismograms for each event. In scenario mode, the user can specify a scenario earthquake and a list of sites and calculate ground motions at each site for the scenario event. In February 2011, SCEC released Broadband Platform 11.2 as an open-source scientific software distribution. Since that time, we have continued development of the platform by adding a new site response module and new goodness of fit measures by Mayhew and Olsen. Along with a source code distribution of the Broadband Platform, we now offer a virtual software image distribution of the platform to support its use on a variety of computing hardware and operating systems.