Applicability of the NGA-West2 damping scaling factors to ground motions recorded in France

This paper presents a summary of the applicability of the NGA-West2 damping scaling factors to ground motions recorded in France. In developing ground motion models for response spectra, generally, the damping of the oscillator is set to a reference value of five percent of the critical damping. Damping scaling factors (DSF) are used to translate the predictions of 5%-damped ground motion models to any damping ratio of interest. Rezaeian et al. (2014) developed a DSF model based on the NGA-West2 database, capturing the effect of oscillator period, event magnitude, and source-to-site distance. This paper investigates the applicability of that model for the horizontal component of ground motions recorded in France, using Traversa et al. (2020) database for the analysis.