Relationship between ground motion parameters and building damage for 2016 Mw 6.4 Meinong, Taiwan earthquake

Abstract This study examines the relationship between operational ground-motion parameters and building damage during the 2016 M w 6.4 Meinong earthquake in southern Taiwan. We integrate strong-motion recordings from 599 Taiwan Strong Motion Instrumentation Program (TSMIP) stations with a manually verified, georeferenced dataset of 626 damaged buildings, including 271 red-tagged and 355 yellow-tagged buildings in Tainan City. The analysis was conducted at the administrative-district level by comparing district-level damage rates with interval-based peak ground acceleration (PGA) and peak ground velocity (PGV) estimates. Non-zero district-level damage rates first appeared in the PGA interval of approximately 150–175 gal and the PGV interval of approximately 10–20 cm/s, corresponding to approximately MMI VI–VII. In this interval-averaged district-level analysis, PGA showed a clearer descriptive correspondence with red- and yellow-tagged building damage rates than PGV. Building-story information indicates that approximately 70% of the damaged buildings were low-rise structures, suggesting that the observed PGA correspondence may be related to the predominance of low-rise buildings and short-period shaking in the most heavily damaged areas. The results do not imply that PGA is universally superior to PGV; rather, PGA and PGV should be interpreted as complementary parameters whose relative usefulness depends on building inventory, site conditions, and analytical scale. This work provides a manually verified building damage dataset and an event-specific reference for interpreting rapid shaking maps and seismic impact information under Taiwan’s updated red- and yellow-tagged building classification system.