We provide an overview of new ground-motion relations for eastern North America (ENA) developed over the last five years. The empirical-stochastic relations of Atkinson and Boore (1995) are compared to relations developed by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI, 1993; also Toro et al., 1994), Frankel et al. (1996), and the consensus ENA ground-motion values as reported by SSHAC (1996). The main difference between our relations and those of EPRI or Frankel is in the low-frequency amplitudes (f < 2 Hz, all magnitudes). We predict lower amplitudes (by more than a factor of two) at 1 Hz, largely due to our use of an empirical source model rather than a single-corner-frequency Brune source model; the use of the empirical source model is motivated by the desire to match the ENA ground-motion database as closely as possible.

We also compare our new ENA relations to empirical relations for California. The comparison is complicated by the need to adjust the ENA hard-rock motions to obtain equivalent motions for typical California soil conditions. Two alternative methods of making this correction lead to somewhat different conclusions. One possible conclusion is that our ENA relations predict similar low-frequency amplitudes to those predicted by Boore et al. (1993, 1994) and Abrahamson and Silva (1996) for California, but our predicted ENA amplitudes are much higher (factor > 2) than California values at high frequencies. The alternative soil correction leads to the conclusion that our ENA relations are moderately lower (factor<2) than the California relations at low frequencies, and moderately higher at high frequencies. Both of these conclusions imply that ground-motion relations or time series for earthquakes in one region cannot be simply modified for use in engineering analyses in another region.