Since 1962, strong ground motions and earthquake responses of structures have been observed in the major ports in Japan. In 2016, 2864 accelerograms were obtained and analyzed at the Port and Airport Research Institute.
The strong-motion earthquake observation network in Japanese ports consists of 153 strong-motion accelerographs installed at 61 ports as of December 2016. Seventy-seven accelerographs out of 153 are installed on ground surface, 56 accelerographs are in ground by using bore-hole and the rest 20 are on structures such as quay walls. Currently six types of accelerographs are used in the network, namely, the ERS accelerograph, the SMAC-MDU accelerograph, the Datol-100 accelerograph, the Omni accelerograph, the Basalt accelerograph and the CV-374 accelerograph, all of which are negative feedback accelerographs equipped with a digital recorder.
This report presents the results of observation and preliminary analysis of records obtained in 2016. ASCII data of the recorded accelerations for all the records in 2016 are available on the attached DVD in the user-friendly CSV format. Also, computer plots of recorded accelerations are available on the DVD for the records with peak accelerations exceeding 20 Gal. For the records with peak accelerations exceeding 50 Gal, computer plots of recorded accelerations, integrated velocities and displacements, Fourier spectra and response spectra are available on the DVD.

Key Words: earthquake, port, strong-motion earthquake observation, acceleration record,Fourier spectra