The horizontal-to-vertical spectral ratio has become popular in studies of the site effect and the determination of the predominant period of a site. In this study, this method is extended to identify nonlinear soil responses. To establish this fact, borehole array records that have already shown nonlinear site responses previously using the spectral ratios between surface and borehole station pairs are analyzed. However in this study, the horizontal-to-vertical spectral ratio method is used for weak and strong motion records from the same datasets. The results show that nonlinear site responses can be evaluated using horizontal-to-vertical spectral ratios of surface recordings at a single station. We can try to apply this method to study the nonlinear soil response during the 2008 Wenchuan, China earthquake thereafter.
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