An entry from Jennifer Middendorf's blog for 19 December 2013 entitled, "A couple of delayed entries".
A couple inspect the entrance to an apartment block on Peterborough Street.
A couple outside an apartment block on Peterborough Street. USAR codes have been spray painted on the posts.
A photograph submitted by Anonymous to the QuakeStories website. The description reads, "Community Probation Service, corner of Anzac Drive and Pages Rd, Bexley, a couple of weeks after February 22.".
A photograph submitted by Jocelyn to the QuakeStories website. The description reads, "The outside loo – a very welcomed ‘posh’ necessity in those first couple of weeks after Feb 22nd.".
A photograph of two people carrying flowers. The photograph is captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "On New Brighton Road we came across this couple decorating cones".
A photograph submitted by Tim Kerr to the QuakeStories website. The description reads, "Here’s me working in Selwyn St just a couple of doors away from home. (Photo M D Kerr)".
A photograph submitted by Sam Langley to the QuakeStories website. The description reads, "Merivale shops a couple days after the Feb quake. All gone now. If you look closely you can see an oddly large mushroom.".
A photograph submitted by Jenny to the QuakeStories website. The description reads, "Hereford Street a couple of minutes after the quake. Dust from collapsed buildings visible in the background looking towards High Street.".
A photograph taken from the top of the BNZ building. The photograph is captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "There are workers suspended from a cage about a third of the way up the Pacific Tower as well as a couple of workers on the top penthouse floor. It's hard to see where they are suspended from".
This poster discusses several possible approaches by which the nonlinear response of surficial soils can be explicitly modelled in physics-based ground motion simulations, focusing on the relative advantages and limitations of the various methodologies. These methods include fully-coupled 3D simulation models that directly allow soil nonlinearity in surficial soils, the domain reduction method for decomposing the physical domain into multiple subdomains for separate simulation, conventional site response analysis uncoupled from the simulations, and finally, the use of simple empirically based site amplification factors We provide the methodology for an ongoing study to explicitly incorporate soil nonlinearity into hybrid broadband simulations of the 2010-2011 Canterbury, New Zealand earthquakes.
We present initial results from a set of three-dimensional (3D) deterministic earthquake ground motion simulations for the northern Canterbury plains, Christchurch and the Banks Peninsula region, which explicitly incorporate the effects of the surface topography. The simu-lations are done using Hercules, an octree-based finite-element parallel software for solving 3D seismic wave propagation problems in heterogeneous media under kinematic faulting. We describe the efforts undertaken to couple Hercules with the South Island Velocity Model (SIVM), which included changes to the SIVM code in order to allow for single repetitive que-ries and thus achieve a seamless finite-element meshing process within the end-to-end ap-proach adopted in Hercules. We present our selection of the region of interest, which corre-sponds to an area of about 120 km × 120 km, with the 3D model reaching a depth of 60 km. Initial simulation parameters are set for relatively high minimum shear wave velocity and a low maximum frequency, which we are progressively scaling up as computing resources permit. While the effects of topography are typically more important at higher frequencies and low seismic velocities, even at this initial stage of our efforts (with a maximum of 2 Hz and a mini-mum of 500 m/s), it is possible to observe the importance of the topography in the response of some key locations within our model. To highlight these effects we compare the results of the 3D topographic model with respect to those of a flat (squashed) 3D model. We draw rele-vant conclusions from the study of topographic effects during earthquakes for this region and describe our plans for future work.