We are very honored to receive the JDR Award for the Most Downloaded Article 2022, a new award from the Journal of Disaster Research (JDR).

After the 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake, it is now said that a magnitude 9-class earthquake could occur in the Nankai Trough, and it is necessary for us to know how strong ground motion (shaking) we will experience during such a great earthquake in order to take countermeasures. In this paper, we developed a new seismic motion prediction model that is applicable to M9-class earthquakes. We did this by adding the strong-motion records of the 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake to the many records accumulated by various organizations since the 1950s. We would like to express our gratitude to all the organizations that provided us with their valuable records.

Nearly 10 years have passed since the publication of the paper, and the records accumulated during that time have helped us to recognize the usefulness of our proposed model. We understand that our paper is still being downloaded in large numbers today and that our model is now being used not only in research but also in practice.

As natural disasters occur more frequently in Japan and around the world, we hope that JDR will continue to grow and develop as an international source of useful knowledge on natural disasters.