During my undergradute career I was hired by the Nevada Seismological Laboratory to run computer simulations of ground motion in the Las Vegas Valley. This reasearch resulted in a paper that resulted in a peer reviewed publication the Bullitien of Seismological Society of America (BSSA). Some key figures from the publication are shown below and a copy of the publication can be found here.
Map showing the numerical grid used to simulate the LSM earthquake into its regional topographic context. Diamonds mark Las Vegas and Henderson, Nevada’s two largest cities and red triangles mark seismometers from the BLUME network.
A) Bandpass-filtered observed recorded (thin black traces) and ShakeZoning 3-d synthetic velocity seismograms (thick gray traces) from the nearest station to the source. B) Frequency spectra of the NSZ synthetic (gray) and observed (black) seismograms from the Little Skull Mountain scenario.
Peak horizontal ground velocity (PGV) map for the Nevada ShakeZoning Little Skull Mountain earthquake scenario at 0.1 Hz, overlain on a map of shaded-relief topography. Notice the ground motion was channeled trhough valleys from the source to the valley.