Methods for estimating rotational components of seismic ground motion and their numerical comparisons*

Abstract

Rotational components play an important role in natural earthquake research, engineering seismic investigation, building monitoring, seismic exploration and other fields. Traditional researches mainly focus on three translational components, but less on rotational ones. As the precision of rotational sensing techniques has increased, many scholars have paid more attention to the seismic rotational motions. Because the rotational observations are not very popular before and now, approximately converting the translational components into rotational components is utilized in rotation analysis. Based on numerical six-component seismic data with the finite difference method, we compare three different conversion methods, the travelling-wave, frequency-domain and the difference method, to analyze their characteristics and feasibilities when they are applied to estimate rotational components with translational observations.