Correlation of horizontal and vertical components of strong ground motion for response-history analysis of safety-related nuclear facilities

•The correlation of components of ground motion is studied using 1689 sets of records.•The data support an upper bound of 0.3 on the correlation coefficient.•The data support the related requirement in the upcoming edition of ASCE Standard 4. Design standards for safety-related nuclear facilities such as ASCE Standard 4-98 and ASCE Standard 43-05 require the correlation coefficient for two orthogonal components of ground motions for response-history analysis to be less than 0.3. The technical basis of this requirement was developed by Hadjian three decades ago using 50 pairs of recorded ground motions that were available at that time. In this study, correlation coefficients for (1) two horizontal components, and (2) the vertical component and one horizontal component, of a set of ground motions are computed using records from a ground-motion database compiled recently for large-magnitude shallow crustal earthquakes. The impact of the orientation of the orthogonal horizontal components on the correlation coefficient of ground motions is discussed. The rules in the forthcoming edition of ASCE Standard 4 for the correlation of components in a set of ground motions are shown to be reasonable.