Ground motion on alluvial valleys under incident plane SH waves

abstract A method is presented to compute the scattering and diffraction of harmonic SH waves by an arbitrarily shaped alluvial valley. The problem is formulated in terms of a system of Fredholm integral equations of the first kind with the integration paths outside the boundary. A discretization scheme using line source solutions is employed and the boundary conditions are satisfied in the least-squares sense. Numerical results for amplification spectra for different geometries are presented. Agreement with known analytical solutions is excellent.