In the present paper, the three-dimensional model of a typical rectangular concrete tank is excited using an artificial and a natural three components earthquake ground motion and the staggered displacement method is utilized for solving the coupled problem of the tank-contained liquid system in time domain. In the proposed method, surface sloshing of the liquid is taken into account in addition to the impulsive term and the appropriate damping values are applied on both of them. The resulted responses are compared with those obtained from the ABAQUS finite element software. It is found that the convective term affects responses extensively and must be considered in seismic design/safety assessment of storage tanks. In addition, the utilized method for solving the coupled problem is stable during the conducted general dynamic analyses and is able to capture the expected phenomena.