{"ID":2861764,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00372","arxiv_id":"2510.00372","title":"Parametric modeling of shear wave velocity profiles for the conterminous U.S","abstract":"Earthquake ground motions and the related damage can be significantly impacted by near-surface soils. Accurate predictions of seismic hazard require depth-continuous models of soil stiffness, commonly described in terms of shear-wave velocity (VS). For regional-scale studies, efforts to predict VS remotely, such as the U.S. Geological Survey's National Crustal Model, tend to emphasize deeper lithologic velocity structures, thus simplifying important near-surface soil velocity variations, and tend to be produced at relatively coarse geospatial resolution for one geographic area. In this study, we define a functional form to describe VS-with-depth across the conterminous U.S. We calibrate the parameters of the function using a national compilation of more than 9,000 in-situ geotechnical measurements. By coupling the parametric framework with geospatial machine learning, the model can be leveraged to provide consistent, high resolution VS-depth predictions of the near-surface geotechnical layer across the U.S., complementing the National Crustal Model and supporting applications such as physics-based ground motion simulations and coseismic hazard assessments.","short_abstract":"Earthquake ground motions and the related damage can be significantly impacted by near-surface soils. Accurate predictions of seismic hazard require depth-continuous models of soil stiffness, commonly described in terms of shear-wave velocity (VS). For regional-scale studies, efforts to predict VS remotely, such as the...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00372","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00372v1","authors":"[\"Morgan D. Sanger\",\"Brett W. Maurer\"]","published":"2025-10-01T00:37:17Z","proceeding":"physics.geo-ph","tasks":"[\"physics.geo-ph\",\"cs.LG\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}