Revisiting the Basin-edge Effect at Kobe During the 1995 Hyogo-Ken Nanbu Earthquake

The basin edge effect, i.e., the interference of the direct S wave with the surface wave diffracted off the basin edge has been invoked by many authors to explain the damage distribution during the January 17, 1995 Hyogo-Ken Nanbu (Kobe) earthquake. Here we present the results of numerical experiments obtained with the spectral element method in 2-D geometry. Our results confirm that the amplification of horizontal motion close to the basin edge can be twice as large as the one measured in the center of the basin. This additional amplification is shown to depend strongly on the edge geometry and on frequency, due to physical dispersion of diffracted surface waves. In particular we obtain maximal amplification around 3 Hz, at frequencies critical for buildings.