Future design procedures for civil structures, especially those to be protected from extreme and blast related

loads, will need to account for temporal evolution of their frequency content. There are, however, several instances

where acceleration time histories are required as seismic input. For example, to determine the ultimate resistance and

to identify modes of structures’ failure, a nonlinear time history analysis is needed. In other cases, acceleration time

histories are required for linear analyses. Many seismic codes require this type of analysis for buildings which have

irregularities. The process of time-frequency analysis made possible by the wavelet transform provides insight into the

character of transient signals through time-frequency maps of the time variant spectral decomposition that traditional

approaches miss. In this paper an approach is examined and a new method for processing the ground motion which is

modeled as a non-stationary process (both in amplitude and frequency), is proposed. This method uses the best basis

search algorithm with wavelet packets. In this approach, the signal is expressed as a linear combination of timefrequency

atoms which are obtained by dilations of the analyzing functions, and are organized into dictionaries as

wavelet packets. Several numerical examples are given to verify the developed models.