Design Ground Motions

By Earthquake Hazards Program

Engineers should typically use the tools below for seismic design; the parameter values they provide are not typically identical to those from hazard tools available elsewhere on the USGS website.

The USGS collaborates with organizations that develop building codes (for buildings, bridges, and other structures) to make seismic design parameter values available to engineers. The design code developers first decide how USGS earthquake hazard information should be applied in design practice. Then, the USGS calculates values of seismic design parameters based on USGS hazard values and in accordance with design code procedures.

U.S. Seismic Design Maps Web Services

Due to insufficient resources and the recent development of similar web tools by third parties, the USGS has replaced its former U.S. Seismic Design Maps web applications with web services that can be used through third-party tools. Your options for using the replacement USGS web services, which still provide seismic design parameter values from numerous design code editions, are:

Third-party Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs)

Most users obtain seismic design parameter values from the USGS web services through third-party GUIs like the following:

USGS U.S. Seismic Design Maps Web Services

It is possible, but less convenient, to obtain seismic design parameter values directly from the USGS web services:

Risk-Targeted Ground Motion Calculator

This web tool calculates risk-targeted ground motion values from probabilistic seismic hazard curves in accordance with the site-specific ground motion procedures defined in “Method 2” (Section 21.2.1.2) of the ASCE/SEI 7-10 and 7-16 standards. The vast majority of engineering projects in the U.S. will require use of the U.S. Seismic Design Maps Web Services (see above) rather than this Risk-Targeted Ground Motion Calculator.

Seismic Design Data Sets (Text file format)

Gridded text files.

Seismic Design Maps (PDF format)

Seismic design maps from various design code reference documents are available below as PDF files.