Bulletin of Engineering Geology and the Environment, cilt.80, sa.7, ss.5589-5607, 2021 (SCI-Expanded)
© 2021, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.Local soil characteristics play a key role in determining soil-structure interaction and reliability of the superstructure behavior under seismic loadings. Therefore, correct determination of soil behavior under dynamic loads is very important. During the Kocaeli and Duzce Earthquakes in 1999, many buildings collapsed resulting to a large number of casualties. In this study, the dynamic behavior of local site effects on the ground response was investigated using the vertical array data. For this purpose, the local soil characteristics were determined by evaluating 42 boreholes drilled in the studied area. The ground response of the soil columns obtained from the logs was examined by the equivalent analyses using the DeepSoil program in order to determine the effect of local soil characteristics on the dynamic behavior. In the analysis, the spectral parameters of the ground were determined using 11 different acceleration records as the building codes require. Spectral behavior resulted from the analyses that were compared to the envelopes of international building codes such as EC8, IBC-ASCE 7-05, and TEC 2018. In addition, the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping was utilized to represent the soil amplification obtained from the analyses. It was observed that the local soil profile having different contents controls the ground response and the features of the spectral behavior of the data vary from the building codes in terms of the flat part and the corner frequencies.