The Cologne Cathedral, the largest Gothic church in northern Europe and aWorld Heritage Site since 1996, is located in the heart of Cologne, a city of one million inhabitants in western Germany. Some 150 m from the Cologne central train station and 350 m from the Rhine River, one of the busiest waterways in Europe, and right next to a busy street and a high-use parking garage, it receives manifold ground motions of anthropogenic origin. However, when the constant daily stream of tourists, about six million annually, ceases in the evening hours after the church is closed to the public or during church services, the building becomes an oasis of silence despite its location right in the city center. Since 2006, the cathedral is equipped with five permanent strong-motion stations which are part of a strong-motion network covering the Lower Rhine Embayment (Hinzen and Fleischer, 2007). All stations use Epi sensor accelerometers and record continuously at 250 samples per second. Set up of stations and measurement examples from the cathedral have been given in detail by Hinzen et al. (2012).
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