Pre-seismic ionospheric anomalies detected before the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that correlation analysis of GNSS-derived TEC data can detect ionospheric anomalies minutes before the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake, supporting the existence of pre-seismic ionospheric phenomena.

Contribution

Introduces a correlation analysis method for detecting pre-seismic ionospheric anomalies using public GNSS data, distinguishing them from other disturbances.

Findings

Detected ionospheric anomalies tens of minutes before the earthquake

Developed an indicator to differentiate pre-seismic anomalies from MSTIDs

Supported the hypothesis of pre-earthquake ionospheric phenomena

Abstract

On April 15, 2016, the Kumamoto earthquake (Mw 7.3) occurred in Japan with no warning signals. Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers provide useful information on disturbances in ionosphere by calculating the changes in Total Electron Content (TEC), which is the number of electrons in ionosphere. Here we show our recently proposed correlation analysis of TEC data which can detect the pre-seismic ionospheric anomalies from the public GNSS data. Our method detected the ionospheric anomaly several tens of minutes before the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake near its epicenter. Furthermore, we gave an indicator to distinguish between the pre-seismic TEC anomalies and the medium scale traveling ionospheric disturbances (MSTIDs) by calculating the anomalous area rates. These results support the hypothesis for existence of the preceding phenomena before large earthquakes.