Here we compare the acceleration records of two earthquakes: the 1971 San Fernando and the 1994 Northridge, both recorded a few blocks away from the HOA:

Comparison of these records establishes that the 1994 Northridge, with many repeatable high ground acceleration (RHGA) "spikes" higher than 0.1g, is stronger than the San Fernando ground motion, with much fewer such spikes. In fact the duration of time when acceleration exceeds .05g is about 3 seconds for Northridge, only 1 second for San Fernando.

What about damage potential?  Accelerations and Newmark velocities and displacements are shown below. The Newmark displacement shows accumulation of damaging strain (shown as velocity, blue,  and displacement, green) when the threshold acceleration exceeds 0.05g

for an audio version of this earthquake damage (frequency proportional to relative velocity), click here.

for an audio version of this earthquake damage (frequency proportional to relative velocity), click here.

We conclude that the Newmark displacement for the  1994 Northridge earthquake is more than twice as great than from the 1971 San Fernando. This confirms that the analysis by the straightforward RHGA method provides a good measure of the relative strength of the two earthquakes in the downtown Los Angles area.