Design Ground Motion Library: An Interactive Tool for Selecting Earthquake Ground Motions

The Design Ground Motion Library (DGML) is an interactive tool for selecting earthquake ground motion time histories based on contemporary knowledge and engineering practice. It was created from a ground motion database that consists of 3,182 records from shallow crustal earthquakes in active tectonic regions rotated to fault-normal and fault-parallel directions. The DGML enables users to construct design response spectra based on Next-Generation Attenuation (NGA) relationships, including conditional mean spectra, code spectra, and user-specified spectra. It has the broad capability of searching for time history record sets in the database on the basis of the similarity of a record's response spectral shape to a design response spectrum over a user-defined period range. Selection criteria considering other ground motion characteristics and user needs are also provided. The DGML has been adapted for online application by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) and incorporated as a beta version on the PEER database website.