The American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) is an independent organization devoted to the development of standards.

American Society for Testing and Materials

Minimum Design Loads for Buildings and Other Structures provides requirements for general structural design and includes means for determining dead, live, soil, flood, wind, snow, rain, atmospheric ice, and earthquake loads, as well as their combinations, which are suitable for inclusion in building codes and other documents. This Standard, a revision of ASCE/SEI 7-05, offers a complete update and reorganization of the wind load provisions, expanding them from one chapter into six. The Standard contains new ultimate event wind maps with corresponding reductions in load factors, so that the loads are not affected, and updates the seismic loads with new risk-targeted seismic maps. The snow, live, and atmospheric icing provisions are updated as well. In addition, the Standard includes a detailed Commentary with explanatory and supplementary information designed to assist building code committees and regulatory authorities. Standard ASCE/SEI 7 is an integral part of building codes in the United States. Many of the load provisions are substantially adopted by reference in the International Building Code and the NFPA 5000 Building Construction and Safety Code. Structural engineers, architects, and those engaged in preparing and administering local building codes will find this Standard an essential reference in their practice. Note: New orders are fulfilled from the second printing, which incorporates the errata to the first printing.

Minimum Design Loads for Buildings and Other Structures

We investigate the rupture process of the 25 April 2015 Gorkha earthquake (Mw = 7.9) using a kinematic joint inversion of teleseismic waves, strong motion data, high-rate GPS, static GPS, and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. The rupture is found to be simple in terms of coseismic slip and even more in terms of rupture velocity, as both inversion results and a complementing back projection analysis show that the main slip patch broke unilaterally at a steady velocity of 3.1–3.3 km/s. This feature likely contributes to the moderate peak ground acceleration (0.2 g) observed in Kathmandu. The ~15 km deep rupture occurs along the base of the coupled portion of the Main Himalayan Thrust and does not break the area ranging from Kathmandu to the front. The limitation in length and width of the rupture cannot be identified in the preearthquake interseismic coupling distribution and is therefore discussed in light of the structural architecture of the megathrust.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/2015GL066044

Rupture process of the Mw = 7.9 2015 Gorkha earthquake (Nepal): Insights into Himalayan megathrust segmentation

Rupture process of the Mw7.9 2015 Gorkha earthquake (Nepal): insights into Himalayan megathrust segmentation

A global slope unit-based method for the near real-time prediction of earthquake-induced landslides

The 2015 Gorkha Nepal earthquake caused tremendous damage and loss. To gain valuable lessons from this tragic event, an earthquake damage investigation team was dispatched to Nepal from 1 May 2015 to 7 May 2015. A unique aspect of the earthquake damage investigation is that first-hand earthquake damage data were obtained 6 to 11 days after the mainshock. To gain deeper understanding of the observed earthquake damage in Nepal, the paper reviews the seismotectonic setting and regional seismicity in Nepal and analyzes available aftershock data and ground motion data. The earthquake damage observations indicate that the majority of the damaged buildings were stone/brick masonry structures with no seismic detailing, whereas the most of RC buildings were undamaged. This indicates that adequate structural design is the key to reduce the earthquake risk in Nepal. To share the gathered damage data widely, the collected damage data (geo-tagged photos and observation comments) are organized using Google Earth and the kmz file is made publicly available.

/pdf/the-2015-gorkha-nepal-earthquake-insights-from-earthquake-2osrszqou7.pdf

The 2015 Gorkha Nepal Earthquake: Insights from Earthquake Damage Survey

A kriging method of interpolation used to map liquefaction potential over alluvial ground

Reconnaissance report on geotechnical and structural damage caused by the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake, Nepal

The Kathmandu Valley is within a seismically active region with only few recorded strong-motion data. Geophysical information in the Valley is also sparse. In addition, the absence of an open datab...

/pdf/the-safer-geodatabase-for-the-kathmandu-valley-geotechnical-3vmul6ar07.pdf

The SAFER geodatabase for the Kathmandu Valley: Geotechnical and geological variability:

Geostatistical methods are valuable to better understand the spatial distribution of geotechnical parameters at regional scale and to optimize the locations of future ground investigations. This ar...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/8755293020970977

Rama Mohan Pokhrel

Papers

The 2015 Gorkha Nepal Earthquake: Insights from Earthquake Damage Survey

A kriging method of interpolation used to map liquefaction potential over alluvial ground

Reconnaissance report on geotechnical and structural damage caused by the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake, Nepal

The SAFER geodatabase for the Kathmandu Valley: Geotechnical and geological variability:

The SAFER geodatabase for the Kathmandu valley: Bayesian kriging for data-scarce regions: