Effects of complex surficial geology on seismic amplification in Quebec, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Local geological and geotechnical conditions strongly influence the intensity and frequency content of seismic ground shaking. Seismic codes often use an amplification factor (AF) to adjust the rock-level response spectrum based on subsurface parameters. However, using a single parameter such as Vs30 or broad site classes may overlook regional variability, introducing bias in hazard assessments. In this study, we conducted nonlinear ground response analysis on 52 soil profiles from the Saguenay region , using six eastern Canadian ground motions scaled to five NBCC 2020 hazard levels. We examined how shear-wave velocity, total soil thickness, and till layers affect nonlinear amplification. We also evaluated different site proxies – Vs30, average shear-wave velocity (Vsavg), soil thickness (Hsoil), and fundamental site period (T0) – in capturing amplification behavior. Our results show that shear-wave velocity, soil thickness, and till layers significantly influence site response. Nonlinear soil behavior reduces amplification at high shaking levels, especially in stiff and shallow profiles, and shifts predominant periods. While Vs30 effectively captures short-to-medium period responses, T0 better represents long-period amplification. A comparison reveals that NBCC 2020 often overestimates amplification and underscores the need for site-specific micro-zonation using optimal site proxies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".