Using pad-stripped acausally filtered strong-motion data

Most strong-motion data processing involves acausal low-cut filtering, which requires the addition of sometimes lengthy zero pads to the data. These padded sections are commonly removed by organizations supplying data, but this can lead to incompatibilities in measures of ground motion derived in the usual way from the padded and the pad-stripped data. One way around this is to use the correct initial conditions in the pad-stripped time series when computing displacements, velocities, and linear oscillator response. Another way of ensuring compatibility is to use postprocessing of the pad-stripped acceleration time series. Using 4071 horizontal and vertical acceleration time series from the Turkish strong-motion database, we show that the procedures used by two organizations--ITACA (ITalian ACcelerometric Archive) and PEER NGA (Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center-Next Generation Attenuation)--lead to little bias and distortion of derived seismic-intensity measures.