Physics-based seismic input for engineering applications: a case study in the Aterno river valley, Central Italy

In this paper, we present 3D physics-based numerical simulations, in the nearsource region at the regional scale, of the 2009, April 6, L’Aquila earthquake (central Italy), based on improved models of the Aterno river basin geology and source kinematics. The simulations were carried out by an open-source code, SPEED, based on a discontinuous Galerkin spectral element method. The numerical mesh of the Aterno basin was built on a detailed subsurface geological model and on the evaluation of the dynamic properties of the soils. The source model was selected among the kinematic solutions available in the literature as the one that fits best the near-source observations. Broadband ground motions were then generated through a hybrid method, combining 3D low frequency waveforms with high-frequency stochastic synthetics. To provide an example of application as seismic input to earthquake engineering analyses in the time domain, results of this approach were used for 2D site response analyses at Castelnuovo, a village severely damaged by the earthquake, and in the neighborhood of which no seismic record was available. SPEED simulation satisfactorily reproduces the recorded accelerograms in the frequency range 0.1–0.7 Hz. The site response analysis at the local scale shows that the amplification of the hill is more significant at its natural frequency, due to topographic and stratigraphic factors, than at the peak of the seismic input simulated by SPEED, that is at about 3 s along the fault-normal component. The presented application supports the conclusion that 3D physics-based numerical simulations do have the potential to become an alternative for determination of input ground motion for earthquake engineering analyses, especially for those scenarios for which real records are not available.