[M-IS04] Interdisciplinary studies on pre-earthquake processes

[MIS04-08] Re-occurrence of transient effects in the atmosphere/ionosphere associated with the “anniversary” earthquakes

*Dimitar Ouzounov¹, Sergey Pulinets², Tiger Liu³, Ktasumi Hattori⁴, Menas Kafatos¹, Patrick Taylor⁵ (1.Institute for Earth, Computing, Human and Observing (Institute for ECHO), Chapman University, Orange, California, USA, 2.Space Research Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia, 3.Center for Space and Remote Sensing Research, National Central University, Taoyuan, Taiwan, 4.Department of Earth Sciences, Graduate School of Science, Chiba University, Chiba, Japan, 5.NASA GSFC, Greenbelt, MD, USA )

Keywords:pre-earthquake , Thermal Anomaly, GPS/TEC

We study the re-occurrence mechanism of pre-earthquake abnormalities associated with
transient effects in the atmosphere/ionosphere. As a test case, we analyzed the Thermal Radiation anomalies (TRA) and ionospheric total electron content (TEC) pre-earthquake abnormalities for major “Anniversary” earthquakes that occurred in 2022. We defined “Anniversary” quake phenomena as events occurring on the same date and following the years after the main earthquake, plus or minus several days.
We studied eleven large earthquakes in three regions: i/Japan: M7.3 of 03.16.2022 and M9.0 of 03.11.2011 East Coast Honshu; iii/ Taiwan: M6.9 of 09.18.2022 Taitung and M7.7 of 09.21.1999 Chi-Chil and M6.7 of 03.22.2022 Taitung and M6 of 03.27.2013 Nantou earthquake; and iii/Mexico: M7.6 of 09.19.2022 Michoacan; M7.1 of 09.19.2017 Puebla and M8.0 of 09.19.1985 Mexico City.
We analyzed for TRA and TEC anomalies concerning the earthquake preparation zone (EPZ) of Dobrovolsky et al. (1979) and Bowman et al. (1998). The main goals of this study were: to understand the seismotectonic conditions that preceded the earthquake re-occurrence in the same place and on the same day(s) and to perform a validation study about pre-earthquake signal occurrences in the same atmospheric and solar-geophysical conditions. The pre-earthquake nature of the signals in the atmosphere and ionosphere was recorded by simultaneous analysis of satellite, GPS/TEC, and Satellite Earth observations. Our preliminary results show synergetic coordination between the appearance of pre-earthquake transients’ effects in the atmosphere and ionosphere (with a short time lag, from hours up to a few days). Finally, the spatial characteristics of pre-earthquake anomalies were associated with the large areas scaled with preparation regions estimated by the Dobrovolsky-Bowman relationship.