SCEC Open-Source Tools for Ground Motion Simulation and Validation

Fabio Silva, Scott Callaghan, Christine A. Goulet, & Ahmed E. Elbanna

Submitted August 30, 2026, SCEC Contribution #15531, 2026 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #TBD

The Statewide California Earthquake Center’s (SCEC) Broadband Platform (BBP) is a collection of open-source scientific software modules that can simulate broadband (0-20+ Hz) ground motions through a 1D layered velocity structure for earthquakes at regional scales, compare simulation results between methods, and validate simulation results against observations. The BBP has been developed over the last fifteen years as a collaborative project involving researchers and practitioners from seismology and earthquake engineering, and the SCEC research computing group.

With the newly developed Python-based Ground Motion Simulation Validation (GMSV) software Toolkit, SCEC aims to provide standardized and verified tools to a broad seismological and engineering community of researchers interested in ground motion simulations and their validation. The GMSV Toolkit contains software components from the Broadband Platform for the uniform re-processing of recorded and/or simulated seismograms to enable 1) one-to-one comparisons in time and frequency domains, 2) statistical computations of various validation metrics, and 3) plotting of ground motion data products. It maintains full compatibility with the original codes, and reproduces metric computation, statistics, and plot results obtained in previous BBP studies.

Each code included in the GMSV Toolkit was redesigned to work in a standalone package so that its full capabilities are accessible for the validation of any simulated seismograms, without the need to install other software. For each code packaged in the GMSV Toolkit, we include both a command-line interface that allows tools to be scripted and run directly from the shell, and a Python API for use with other programs.

Both the Broadband Platform and the GMSV Toolkit are distributed with a BSD-3 open-source license on GitHub and can be compiled and run on recent Linux systems with GNU compilers. The GMSV Toolkit comes with extensive training material and tutorials in Jupyter notebook format, containing step-by-step, detailed examples of different validation cases, selected to provide starting templates that users can modify with customized settings. The latest version of the BBP is also available on the Quakeworx Science Gateway, where users only need a web-browser to submit both validation and scenario simulations to SDSC’s Expanse cluster.

Key Words
Ground Motions, Simulations, Open-Source, High-Performance Computing

Citation
Silva, F., Callaghan, S., Goulet, C. A., & Elbanna, A. E. (2026, 08). SCEC Open-Source Tools for Ground Motion Simulation and Validation. Poster Presentation at 2026 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Ground Motions (GM)