TY - JOUR
T1 - Outgoing long wave radiation variability from IR satellite data prior to major earthquakes
AU - Ouzounov, Dimitar
AU - Liu, Defu
AU - Chunli, Kang
AU - Cervone, Guido
AU - Kafatos, Menas
AU - Taylor, Patrick
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported NASA Grant NNG04GO01G. The authors thank to the NOAA's Climate Prediction Center for making OLR data available to the user community and especially Mr. John Janowiak for his help and support of OLR products. Thanks are also due to the Dr. Andrew Tronin for his suggestions and comments and to the second anonymous referee for the assistance in evaluating this paper.
PY - 2007/2/20
Y1 - 2007/2/20
N2 - Our analysis of the continuous outgoing long wave earth radiation (OLR) indicates anomalous variations prior to a number of medium to large earthquakes. The most recent analysis of OLR is from the M9.0 Sumatra Andaman Islands mega trust event. We compared the reference fields for December 2001 to 2004 and found OLR anomalous values, > 80 W/m2, (2σ) within the epicentral area on Dec 21, 2004, 5 days before the event. We used the NOAA/IR daily (one degree) and monthly (two and half degree) gridded data to differentiate between the global and seasonal variability and the transient local anomalies. The cause of such anomalies is not fully understood; one possible explanation is the existence of thermal outgoing radiation as a result of near ground air ionization and latent heat change due to change of air humidity and temperature. This phenomenon is hypothesized to be part of a relationship between tectonic stresses, electrochemical and thermodynamic processes in the atmosphere and increasing mid IR flux, all part of a family of electromagnetic (EM) phenomena related to earthquake activity. The time scale of the observed variations is a few weeks before the onset of the seismic event. In comparison with several years of data, the observed time-series preceding the earthquake had unusually high OLR. The OLR anomaly corresponds to a large area of ground coverage and coincides with the main epicentral zone. The significance of these observations is explored using data from most recent East Asian earthquake swarm of December 2004 and three other earthquakes.
AB - Our analysis of the continuous outgoing long wave earth radiation (OLR) indicates anomalous variations prior to a number of medium to large earthquakes. The most recent analysis of OLR is from the M9.0 Sumatra Andaman Islands mega trust event. We compared the reference fields for December 2001 to 2004 and found OLR anomalous values, > 80 W/m2, (2σ) within the epicentral area on Dec 21, 2004, 5 days before the event. We used the NOAA/IR daily (one degree) and monthly (two and half degree) gridded data to differentiate between the global and seasonal variability and the transient local anomalies. The cause of such anomalies is not fully understood; one possible explanation is the existence of thermal outgoing radiation as a result of near ground air ionization and latent heat change due to change of air humidity and temperature. This phenomenon is hypothesized to be part of a relationship between tectonic stresses, electrochemical and thermodynamic processes in the atmosphere and increasing mid IR flux, all part of a family of electromagnetic (EM) phenomena related to earthquake activity. The time scale of the observed variations is a few weeks before the onset of the seismic event. In comparison with several years of data, the observed time-series preceding the earthquake had unusually high OLR. The OLR anomaly corresponds to a large area of ground coverage and coincides with the main epicentral zone. The significance of these observations is explored using data from most recent East Asian earthquake swarm of December 2004 and three other earthquakes.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.tecto.2006.05.042
DO - 10.1016/j.tecto.2006.05.042
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:33846560187
SN - 0040-1951
VL - 431
SP - 211
EP - 220
JO - Tectonophysics
JF - Tectonophysics
IS - 1-4
ER -