Record Selection Procedures Proposed By Several Countries Standards Compared With Syrian Standards

The European Standard, the New Zealand Standard, the U.S. Standard, the Syrian Standard and the Iranian Standard define a criterion for selecting ground motion records for time-history analysis by similarity between the seismological signature of earthquakes used for the analysis and those earthquakes that are expected to happen at the given location. But these standards follow different methodologies. The New Zealand Standard proposes that the spectrum of each selected record should match the design spectrum over a range of periods related to the fundamental period of the structure investigated. The energy of at least one of these record’s spectra must exceed the energy of the design spectrum. The European Standard recommends that the average spectrum of the selected records should be always higher than 90% of the design spectrum in a defined range of periods, and the value of the average spectrum at period equal zero should be larger than the value of the corresponding design spectrum. The U.S. Standard, also the Syrian and the Iranian Standard; advise that in a defined range of periods, the average spectrum of the selected records should be 40% and higher than the code spectrum. This study illustrates the differences between selecting approaches, and how these differences affect the resulting ground motion records. Some resulting recommendations for record selecting procedures are presented, and advised to be used in addition to the Syrian Standard recommendations.