Seismic Behavior of 2D Semi-Sine Shaped Hills against Vertically Propagating Incident Waves

This paper presents the preliminary results of an extensive parametric study on seismic response of two-dimensional semi-sine shaped hills to vertically propagating incident P- and SV-waves. Clear perspectives of the induced diffraction and amplification patterns are given by investigation of time-domain and frequency-domain responses. It is shown that site geometry, wave characteristics , and material parameters are the key parameters governing the hill’s response, simple formula and some tables are proposed for estimating the characteristic site period and also the average amplification potential of semi-sine shaped hills, which could be easily applied in site effect microzonation studies of topographic areas.