In 2003, Dr. Baise, along with Dr.’s Glaser and Dreger from U.C. Berkley, published two papers on San Franscisco site response in the seismological journal BSSA, and the geotechnical journal “Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering“. These papers laid the foundation for the group’s ongoing investigation into site response complexity, discussing deviations of observation from theory in the form of 3D site response including surface wave effects and epistemic uncertainty due to instrument error. In 2009, Dr. Baise and one of her PhD students, Eric Thompson, used the robust Kik-net dataset to develop site theoretical and empirical transfer functions, noting the frequency with which they differed. This investigation spurred the development of the Thompson et al. 2012 taxonomy which classifies site behavior as an SH1D soil system or a “complex system”. By this classification scheme, a complex system can be due to either the uncertainty in the soil property measurements, which can be remedied by more careful measurement, or by an lack of robustness in the model, for example the lack of inclusion of surface waves in the SH1D model. After this work, she and her student, Jim Kaklamanos, began investigating challenges in predicting site response using the the 1D model, again using the Kik-net database. Currently, she is working with student Marshall Pontrelli to translate the original site response taxonomy of Thompson et al. 2012 to be applied to the single station HVSR, thereby providing a cheaper and quicker way to identify site response complexity.
In addition to this interest in general site response theory, the group has collected and maintained a geotechnical database of the city of Boston for site response and wave propagation studies. In 2004, the group published the “Boston Subsurface Project“, an interactive website providing an database of historic maps of Boston, boreholes and surficial geology. In 2014, they published a paper on SASW derived shear wave velocity profiles for 27 sites in Boston they collected and in 2016, performed a robust site response analysis for the city of Boston. In 2017 ,they published a paper with 570 sites on which they collected microtremor data and performed HVSR, computing fundamental resonance frequencies in Boston and correlating these frequencies to local depths. Currently, they are interested in 3D basin effects and the validity of the SH1D assumptions within the city.