Multi-sensor observations of earthquake related atmospheric signals over major geohazard validation sites

D. Ouzounov1,2, S. Pulinets3, D. Davidenko4, K.Hattori5, M. Kafatos1, P.Taylor2
1 Chapman University, One University Drive, Orange, CA 92866, USA
2NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
3Space Research Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, 117997, Moscow, Russia
4Fidorov Institute of Applied Geophysics, Rostokinsakay str. 9, Moscow, 129128, Russia
5Chiba University, Yayoi 1-33, Inage, Chiba, 263-8522, Japan

We are conducting a scientific validation study involving multi-sensor observations in our investigation of phenomena preceding major earthquakes. Our approach is based on a systematic analysis of several atmospheric and environmental parameters, which we found, are associated with the earthquakes, namely: thermal infrared radiation, outgoing long-wavelength radiation, ionospheric electron density, and atmospheric temperature and humidity. For first time we applied this approach to selected GEOSS sites prone to earthquakes or volcanoes. This provides a new opportunity to cross validate our results with the dense networks of in-situ and space measurements.

We investigated two different seismic aspects, first the sites with recent large earthquakes, viz.- Tohoku-oki (M9, 2011, Japan) and Emilia region (M5.9, 2012,N. Italy). Our retrospective analysis of satellite data has shown the presence of anomalies in the atmosphere. Second, we did a retrospective analysis to check the re-occurrence of similar anomalous behavior in atmosphere/ionosphere over three regions with distinct geological settings and high seismicity: Taiwan, Japan and Kamchatka, which include 40 major earthquakes (M>5.9) for the period of 2005-2009. We found anomalous behavior before all of these events with no false negatives; false positives were less then 10%.

Our initial results suggest that multi-instrument space-borne and ground observations show a systematic appearance of atmospheric anomalies near the epicentral area that could be explained by a coupling between the observed physical parameters and earthquake preparation processes.