Current seismic design guidelines in Japan are diverse in the seismic ground strain estimates, because the concepts on a horizontally propagating wave model are not consistent in various seismic design guidelines including gas, water and other underground structures. The purpose of this study is (a) to derive the analytical methods to estimate the ground strains for incident seismic waves, (b) to develop a statistical estimation technique of the ground strains, and finally (c) to compare the theoretical estimation with the observed data which was measured at 441 sites in the 1999 Chi-Chi Earthquake in Taiwan.