A Global Application Programming Interface–Enabled Earthquake Ground Motion Relational Database for Engineering Applications

We present a application programming interface (API)-enabled relational database of global earthquake ground motion intensity measures, associated metadata, and processed time-series data. Raw ground motion records were processed by the authors using either manual or semi-automated processing procedures, and every processed record has passed a quality review by a trained analyst. Computed intensity measures include peak acceleration and velocity, pseudo-spectral acceleration response spectra, cumulative absolute velocity, Arias Intensity, and Fourier amplitude spectra. The processed time-series data, associated metadata, and ground motion intensity measures were organized into a web-served relational database consisting of 32 tables connected by primary/foreign key pairs. Ground motion metadata and intensity measures (but not time-series) from the Next-Generation Attenuation (NGA)-East and NGA-West2 projects and the Hellenic Strong-Motion Database are also contained in the database. As of this writing (June 2025) the database includes intensity measures and metadata for 76,242 multi-component ground motions recorded at 9927 stations for 1391 events, and is approximately 73.5 GB in size. The database is built using the MySQL relational database management system, and is accessible through a web interface and also an API, which allows users to retrieve data using straightforward and intuitive uniform resource locators (URLs). Compared with more traditional file-download-based methods for data release, the relational database (1) increases storage efficiency, (2) improves data integrity, and (3) enables users to query the data subset they wish to retrieve rather than downloading the entire database and loading it into memory. Furthermore, the web-served nature of the database means that users have immediate access to ground motion data following collection, review, and uploading. Periodic static releases of the database will be published as a means of archiving and facilitating reproducibility. The database has been designed to accommodate growth, with ongoing efforts to integrate global ground motion data (e.g. data development for the NGA-West3 project).