scholarly journals Earthquake prediction, ionospheric total electron content, and three earthquakes in California

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (Suppl. 1) ◽  
pp. 167-174
Author(s):  
Ahmet Urusan

Because it is a newer and unproven technique, ionospheric seismology is still accepted as a phenomenon by a lot of scientists. However, research in this subject is rapidly increasing in the last decade. According to the ionospheric seismology, the mechanical energy accumulated by the compression of the rocks before the big earthquakes is released from the ground by creating a positive hall. These processes at the ground-to-air interface can lead to the injection of massive amounts of air ions into the lower atmosphere [1]. As a result of the injection, the earthquake lights, temperature rising, the pressure in the troposphere, radio frequencies distortions, and total electron content perturbation in ionosphere occur. Therefore, even if it does not enough alone, this parameter can be contributing to earthquake predict. It has been supported with several instances of manuscript. In this study, ionospheric total electron content was calculated for each station and satellite using GPS stations data in California, USA, for three last earthquakes. The earthquakes are named Hector Mine-1999, Baja-2009, and Napa-2014, and their magnitudes are 7.1, 7.2, and 6, respectively. After the processes, quite significant outcomes have been obtained.

The study of atmospheric–ionospheric connections is one of the most exciting and potentially important disciplines in geophysics. Changes in the ionospheric environment might be a method for earthquake prediction. The phenomenon of lithosphere-atmosphere-ionosphere (LAI) coupling is a promising method for earthquake prediction. Various experiments can be used to determine the variability of the ionosphere during earthquakes. The disturbance propagates upward as an atmospheric waves, creating stress, increasing temperature, as well as upper layer disturbances. By measuring ionospheric characteristics, it is quite difficult to determine the specific influence of the major earthquake on the ionospheric Total Electron Content (TEC).


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing Liu ◽  
Wenbin Wang ◽  
Xuemin Zhang

Abstract. Identifying ionospheric disturbances potentially related to an earthquake is a challenging work. Based on the ionospheric total electron content (TEC) data from the madrigal database at the Haystack Observatory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a new decomposition and nonlinear fitting method has been developed and applied in this work to extract the TEC disturbances that are potentially related to the Mw7.2 Mexico earthquake occurred on April 4 2010. By analyzing the TEC data for a long period of time (72 days) before and after the earthquake, we found that a unique TEC depletion occurred in the region around the epicenter on March 25. No other significant ionospheric TEC anomalies were identified in the 72-day period around the earthquake, except some TEC disturbances that appeared to be related to the geomagnetic activity between April 1 and 6, 2010. We further analyzed the TEC data from other magnetically quiet days, and no TEC anomaly like that occurred on March 25 was detected. The TEC data calculated from a first principles model SD-WACCM-X were also analyzed using the same method as that for the observational data. No TEC anomaly was found on March 25 from the model outputs either. Thus the source of the TEC anomaly on March 25 is unlikely from the lower atmosphere waves. In this study, we show the occurrence of TEC anomaly on March 25, 10 days before the Mw7.2 Mexico earthquake and this TEC anomaly may not be explained by lower atmosphere or geomagnetic activity forcing.


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