Earthquake Group Dialog

The Earthquake Group Dialog is a powerful tool that allows the user to enter more than one earthquake for spectral analysis, and save those records so they can be retrieved at any time without going through the selection of individual records.

The dialog is comprised of two major sections:

The top section shows the current default earthquake couple (two components) to be used in a single analysis, the couple can be specified or changed by reading one or two new earthquake components using the Earthquake Dialog. Alternatively, the couple can be copied by a press of a button from a group of earthquakes.

The bottom section shows the current "earthquake group", a group of ground motions that can be edited with ground motions added or removed, and with no limit on the number of earthquakes that can be included (except for practical limitations on memory usage) ! Each component is read using the Earthquake Dialog, or can be assigned from the default earthquake couple (above). The convenience however, is that this group can then be saved to the hard disk, and can be accessed at any later time. Different groups can be constructed and saved. When more than one earthquake couple is included in a group, spectra are computed indivudually for each couple, and the mean and standard deviation of the whole group is also computed. See Spectral Analysis.

When saving earthquake groups, only information about the file that stores the data are saved, in addition to other information on how the record is scaled, the units used, etc. This means that whenever the group file is opened and is to be used, the earthquake record file should be present. Bispec saves both the file name and its path. When the group is later opened, Bispec first looks at the original path to find the file, if the file is not found on the given path, Bispec looks in the directory from which it was started. If the file is not found is neither location, Bispec cannot load that earthquake,and the file must be relocated, or deleted from the group.

It is possible to change the path of a file in case the location of a file changes. Bispec also offers the option of changing the path of all the records in the group at the same time by using the "Change Paths" button.

Figure 1: Earhtquake Group Dialog

Earthquake Group Dialog