Analysis and damage correlation of ground motion intensity measures from records of the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquake

A Ground Motion Intensity Measure (GMIM) provides a quantitative metric of the strength of a ground motion with the objective of defining a mapping to the damaging effects induced by earthquakes. The correlation between GMIMs and earthquake damage allows their use in earthquake engineering applications such as (pre-event) seismic hazard/risk assessment and mitigation, and (post-event) damage assessment and resource allocation for disaster response. GMIMs are also used for damage prediction in the context of performance-based earthquake engineering and earthquake-resistant design. This paper presents the evaluation of GMIMs using strong motion records obtained during the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquake. The GMIMs studied include peak ground acceleration, peak ground velocity, spectral accelerations, root-mean-square acceleration, Arias intensity, cumulative absolute velocity, Housner spectral intensity, and Araya-Saragoni intensity. The GMIMs are evaluated at several spatial locations where ground motion records were measured during the events. The results demonstrate that some GMIMs showed significantly high values at locations where severe damage was observed after the earthquake. Based on a cross-correlation analysis the peak ground acceleration and the root-mean-square acceleration were the GMIMs that showed the strongest correlation with the observed damage. It is also shown that the maximum considered earthquake spectra were exceeded at several locations where extensive damage was observed, with the design base shear underestimated by a factor of up to four when considering the compounding effects of the strong ground motion shaking and the fundamental vibration period shift due to the stiffening induced by infill walls in frame structures.