Easter Island Ionospheric TEC Residuals. Does this mean anything?

There is a theory that major earthquakes cause a higher total electron content (TEC) above the impending epicentre prior to the rupture. This has been the study of several scientists especially since the Tohoku-Oki Mag 9.1 quake where this signal was seen.

You can download this PDF file which discusses this event in relation to TEC values. There is a ton of information out there about this, but nothing seems concrete yet.

Here is another example of some thoughts on the subject. and here is some more about the effects before Japan.

If you wish to see a technical document about TEC and how it is measured you should download and read (not complex) this PDF file from Indonesia and note that they also have detected these variation as earthquake precursors.

On the other hand of course we also have the nay-sayers.

Another member, whose name I have mislaid, spoke about residuals on ATS and was battered by some but I mentioned to him that I was also of the opinion that there may be something in this and that I was collecting the TEC images.

There is an image produced every 5 minutes (link to original site below) and I have been collecting these. Here is a sample of the 3rd week of May.



If you go to the You Tube site you will see I have collected all of these images since the beginning of April.

From time to time there appears to be an area that 'brightens up' first and then remains at a higher level after the main TEC area has passed over. Very occasionally they brighten in little spurts after the main body has passed and even when the level drops down to 10 TECU or less these areas show a very slightly raised value.

Take a look now at Easter Island over the last 4 days. First here is a location map for you. This shows what I mean by a 'residual'



Now watch the video of the last 4 days and keep focussed on that area. You can see that the higher values appear to 'hang around' over that area. (Note also Bermuda/Florida)



ATS member Muzzy posted a map today in the Quake Watch 2012 thread which happens to show Easter Island and some southern quakes, and commented that " its almost like the NAZCA Plate is about to pop out of its socket "

This was the quake that interested me.



So my question is, is there anything in the theory that earthquakes can be identified by heightened TEC levels? If there is can we see this on these maps or are they insufficient for this purpose?

As I understand it the TEC (Total Electron Content) and GIM (Global Ionospheric Maps) are the method for detecting. TEC is the result of a calculation derived from the GPS network and primarily is used to adjust GPS signals and to give indications of radio problems.

I cannot find any other maps as good as the NASA/JPL TEC maps which can be found here

Australia do one

I am thinking that we do not have access to sophisticated enough data but what are other peoples thoughts and has anyone else been researching this?

Another possible indicator would be the temperature maps, of which more later when I have put a set of images together.

One final snippet:

In this ATS thread Introduction & Real-Time Ionospheric TEC (Total Electron Content) Disturbance by tacjtg I compared earthquakes times to TEC values and there did not appear to be a correlation. I did not knock the theory, just put the data there for peole to make up their own minds.

In hindsight, whilst the direct correlation is not there, should we in fact be looking at a much smaller element? The residual rather than the total.

reply to post by PuterMan


EXCELLENT.

Stan Deyo at

www.standeyo.com...

was using the Navy's sea floor temperature anomalies to forecast quakes with some greater than chance accuracy. He's convinced, IIRC that the government took it offlline when they realized he was successfully doing that.

You might contact him and discuss your question. I think his phone number's available on his website. They are a wonderful Christian couple very easy to talk to.

He used to work on UFO's stuff in Australia.

Here is a link to the CTIPe site which shows maps of Thermosphere Ionosphere Plasmasphere Modeling.

Time-dependent major species composition equations are solved including the evolution of O, O2, and N2, under chemistry, transport and mutual diffusion (Fuller-Rowell et al., 1994). The time-dependent variables of southward and eastward wind, total energy density, and concentrations of O, O2, and N2 are evaluated at each grid point by an explicit, time-stepping numerical technique. After each iteration the vertical wind, the temperature, the density, and the heights of pressure surfaces are derived. The parameters can be interpolated to fixed heights for comparison with experimental data.

The model includes a chemical heat source due to the recombination of O$^+$. This is important for the low latitude temperature structure as the large amount of ionization in the equatorial-anomaly crests after sunset turns out to be a significant heat source [Fuller-Rowell et al., 1997]. The ionization, heating, and dissociation rates due to solar EUV radiation are calculated following Solomon and Qian [2005]. The NO cooling is calculated using the NO model of D. Marsh [2004].

There is masses more to read on the CITPe link.

As I understand this in relation to residuals the theory is that radon release by the impending earthquake affects the temperature.

Closely to the event (one day before the shock), spikes of radon pollution into the atmosphere are possible, and the frequency of disturbances of various nature increases. The radon causes non-stationary ionization processes, and consequently an increase of the electrical conductivity inthe atmosphere (Sorokin and Chmyrev, 1998; Pulinets et al., 2000; Liperovsky et al., 2005; Sorokin et al., 2006). Correspondingly, also the vertical electric currents and the mean ionospheric temperature grow. The heating process becomes predominant and causes a diffusionary smearing out of the maximum of the electron density of the F2-layer about one
day, or about two days, before and after strong earthquakes. Thus one may assume that there are two processes of litosphere-ionosphere coupling before earthquakes. The first process is predominant 3–6 days before a shock and, the second one, one day before and one day or two days after a shock. During the first process episods of upstreaming ionospheric plasma flows, a decrease of the recombination and an increase of foF2 take place. During the second process the upstreaming plasma flow also occurs, but the overwhelming processes are the heating and the diffusionary smearing out of the maximum of the electron density of the F2-layer

Day-time variations of foF2 connected to strong earthquakes (PDF)

Not sure how relevant this is but here is a short video of the neutral temperature modelling. These are produced every 10 minutes but I only have a day and a half as I have only just started collecting them.

I certainy think you are making logical sense.....Im no geek but there must be other places which have suffered recent quakes which you can cross check on your saved data......
A years worth is a gold mine i should think.....
Coutldnt somebody here write you a program which will show the real time TEC and the earth quake data simultaneously?
Am i stupid or is that within the realms of possibilit?
It would be easy to run the whole thing backwards and co relate the data for the period in question...youd have signifigant confirmations there.....

reply to post by stirling

Coutldnt somebody here write you a program which will show the real time TEC and the earth quake data simultaneously?

Mm, maybe I should ask PuterMan?

I am a programmer and yes it can be done but I need to find an historical source of the TEC data in numerical format.

excellent data gathering.
You may be onto something, when you posted the vids on Quake Watch I was following the red and orange "hotspots" which seemed to hang out over Brazil then Hawaii.
Maybe been looking for the wrong thing.
On the first vid some of the red and orange hotspots did head to the Easter Island area, on the 19/05 but there were no quakes around there, on LDEO, that day.
The 5+ Easter Is. quakes were on 5, 6, 8, 10(mag6), 12 and 30 May, do you have any maps around those dates?
I'll have a read of your links to unerstand what TEC is.

Stars and flags and a Bud or two(thats Budweiser for short).

I have been watching these TEC maps for a year or so and never really see anything.

I am glad you are on it and can give a little guidance to a mere mortal as myself.

Thanks again!!

reply to post by muzzy

The 5+ Easter Is. quakes were on 5, 6, 8, 10(mag6), 12 and 30 May, do you have any maps around those dates?

Everything from the beginning of April is there, but to save the effort here is May complete, one week at a time.

Week 1


Week 2


Week 3


Week 4 to end

reply to post by PuterMan


Wondering if it has anything to do with the South Atlantic Anomaly?

adsabs.harvard.edu...

Just watched the first 2 weeks of May when all the quakes were happening and you can see a couple of hotspots around Easter Island particularly from about 2012/05/09 23:10 to 2012/05/10 00:55 there is a hotspot of 60-80TECU and there was the mag 6 at 2012/5/10 2:13:52

and again 2012/05/12 1:55 to 06:05 there are 3 pulses 40-60TECU range between Peru and North of Easter Is. . the time of a Mag 5 2012/5/12 4:32:40 (but SE of Easter Is)
and on 2012/05/08 the residual from a green "tail" at 05:30, the time of a Mag 5, 6:28:24 (again SE of EI)
but;
at other times there are other "tails" dragging out of the Easter Island area where there are no quakes listed (on LDEO anyways)

The "blob" always seems to divert north around Easter Island though

I was watching a doco a few months ago the name of which slips my mind now. Anyway, this scientist was crushing rock to extreme pressures and supposedly was measuring a spike in electron values just prior to collapse. I think the theory could indeed be plausible, but I would be thinking the values would be needed to be measured over a ground plane set of data-point collectors. Not so sure if measuring in the ionosphere would have the sensitivity needed to predict quakes?



edit : Forgot, S&F for something interesting and the work you've put into collecting these samples.

edit 2: The show I saw it on was from BBC Horizon - Why cant we predict Earthquakes? Somewhere towards the end from memory if anyone wants to look for it.

Thank you puterman for giving it life again.

There is some intriguing research about whether large earthquakes are associated with ionospheric changes caused by electromagnetic signals released by the crushing of rock crystalline structures. If so, then this might be a mechanism for major earthquake prediction. One of the primary researchers in this area is Friedemann Freund, of NASA Ames. He has written several articles introducing the concept of ionospheric and atmospheric changes as earthquake precursors:

solar-center.stanford.edu...

Been following this TEC theory but it always seems people point this out after a quake has hit. I personally feel that there is something to this theory. Keep up the good work.


On a side note I came across this. Just curious if anyone has done any research into this theory.

Daily change ratio of a triangle area Because of the fluctuation of GPS data of geo-centric coordinates, we thought relative change of a triangle area will be more stable than the movement of point movement. In addition, we can predict a rough location of the origin of earthquake from the maximum value of the change ratio. The daily change ratio of triangle area can be calculated from the following formula.

mycoordinates.org...

reply to post by jam321


Plausible.
www.mitp.ru...

The 11 April 2012, M8.6 and M8.2 earthquakes OFF THE WEST COAST OF NORTHERN SUMATRA did confirm an alarm TIP reported in January, in the regular 2010a Update of the M8-MSc predictions of the Global Test of M8 (Healy et al. 1992; password protected URL www.mitp.ru...; yellow outline in the attached figure). The earthquake epicenters missed the reduced area of alarm (red outline) diagnosed in the second approximation due to inapplicability of the MSc algorithm outside bulk distribution of seismic activity. Nevertheless, it appears remarkable that the reduced area is about the same as the area of the 11 April 2012 first-day aftershocks located at about the same latitudes. The 11 April 2012 great earthquakes have ruptured the conjugate faults, about 300 and 500 km each in the oceanic lithosphere of Indo-Australian plate. Both are strike-slip intra-oceanic-plate events with epicenters in an area of sparse seismicity, some 100 km and 200 km to the southwest of the major seismic belt of the subduction zone next to the complex junction of India, Australia, Sunda, and Burma plates. These events continue a series that can be attributed to the 26 December 2004, M9.1 Sumatra-Andaman mega-thrust, followed by the 28 March 2005, M8.6 great Nias earthquake. In course the Global Test of M8 a segment of the subduction zone from Burma to Southern Sumatra was recognized as capable of producing magnitude M8.0+ event starting from July 2005-January 2006, which prediction was already confirmed with a pair of the great 12 September 2007, M8.5 SOUTHERN SUMATRA and M8.1 KEPULAUAN MENTAWAI REGION, INDONESIA earthquakes (www.mitp.ru...). (Note: The M8 algorithm provides prediction in the first approximation, and the algorithm MSc, if the data permit, narrows down the area covered by alarm. Both apply to the null approximation delivered by identifying earthquake-prone zones, e.g. "active fault zones", "D-intersections or knots", etc.)

The theory does lend credence to the idea that there are warning signs to a quake. Problem is, we never really knew of any to look at before. Now with all of this information influx into our brains from new data contrived from sat imagery and topo mapping down to the inch. We see more than we ever have before.

That said, I always thought that since an earthquake is a production of too much pressure, that perhaps it harmonically produces pressure elsewhere.

Magnetic waves under low EM frequency have been reported around areas of earthquakes either before or directly after. The idea that this could transfer energy into the atmosphere over an area of effect isnt crazy.

On another note.....some would say that HAARP has the ability to compress and inflate the upper ionosphere due to how the antenna is designed to operate. While I doubt that's the case here...the one pre quake image of the same phenom they shown over Japan was more in line with something man made and not naturally occurring.

That and when you add the fact that for the amount of energy released during that quake, it only effected a small area of fault when it should have been understandably more fault area effected.

I dont care if someone thinks HAARP is harmless or not, but when you pump that much juice through a focal array that pushes energy waves through a focused area your not only gonna get a good study of aurora, but your also gonna have the ability to push an electro-magnetic charge into the upper ionosphere. What that does to the pressure pushing down is anyones guess.

Yet the pressure from the atmosphere all the way down to the ground (thanks to gravity) is pushing on the plates the same way that the energy and heat from the core is pushing back against it. Its in a dance of balance, if anything throws one or the other off, your gonna notice via shifting of that paradigm to balance if you will.

Then we're not accounting for solar energy that may effect certain precursors that irritate the situation but that another thread entirely.

I believe that earthquake activity can cause strange phenomena in the sky, most of which are balls of light. I never had any idea as to a mechanism of action, and this hit me right away as being a viable explanation of why these things happen. Maybe even just above fault lines in general, at least ones that are active. Thanks for posting this, as it may help me a lot.

reply to post by Chadwickus


Indeed it may be so, but my observation is that the 'residual' in the past week or so in this area has been much more noticeable than in the previous weeks that I have been watching.

If you look at April for example - I randomly picked week 3, this effect is hardly visible at all. I would imagine that the insolation would be very slightly less between then and now as the Northern hemisphere moves towards it's maximum inclination to the Sun.

reply to post by kdog1982


I have asked that site twice about access now and just get completely ignored.

That really pisses me off as I have pointed out to them I am not someone with very little knowledge about the subject and that my interest is serious.

reply to post by GrandHeretic

I dont care if someone thinks HAARP is harmless or not, but when you pump that much juice through a focal array that pushes energy waves through a focused area your not only gonna get a good study of aurora, but your also gonna have the ability to push an electro-magnetic charge into the upper ionosphere. What that does to the pressure pushing down is anyones guess.

HAARP is so puny compared to the energies harnessed by Mother Nature you can quite safely dismiss it. The total energy from the Sun alone that enters the Earth's atmosphere is estimated at 173 petawatts which very roughly is 622,800 petajoules per hour. This is the equivalent energy of 311 or more Tohoku Mag 9.0 earthquakes every hour. HAARP is (the largest one) 1 billion watts which is .0036 Petajoules per hour. It really is sort of irrelevant.

As far as the rest goes, yes everything is interconnected. We need to find the connections.

I had an idea last night. which I am not sure how to go about yet, that if you could plot the TEC as another member said, using numbers you could get an average value for a given sector at certain times of the year. The problem is that this will be affected by magnetic storms, but if it could be done then you could produce a set of anomaly data which would allow you to see where changes were occurring.

If this was matched to (presumed) stress build up in an area it might be possible to match predicted stress to TEC anomaly and get a correlation that may aid in predicting an event.

It is a massive undertaking way outside my reach, but it seems to me that something like this may work.

The first thing is to reduce the TEC to numbers, and I guess NASA must have that data. Then a study has to be done to estimate all the active areas and the current stress build up. I have started on this in a small way but the site that kdog referenced has done much more, and there are others out there as well.

There's this from JGR Space Physics, out of China and Taiwan.

625 KB pdf Fulltext hosted by National Central University, Taiwan.

www.ss.ncu.edu.tw/~jyliu/paper/2011136.pdf

www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2010JA015781.shtml

JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 116, A02303, 5 PP., 2011
doi:10.1029/2010JA015781

A statistical analysis of ionospheric anomalies before 736 M6.0+ earthquakes during 2002–2010

H. Le

Institute of Space Science, National Central University, Chung-Li, Taiwan

Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

J. Y. Liu

Institute of Space Science, National Central University, Chung-Li, Taiwan

L. Liu

Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

This paper presents a statistical study of the pre-earthquake ionospheric anomaly by using the total electron content (TEC) data from the global ionosphere map. A total of 736 M ≥ 6.0 earthquakes in the global area during 2002–2010 are selected. The anomaly day is first defined. Then the occurrence rates of abnormal days for both the days within 1–21 days prior to the earthquakes (PE) and the background days (PN) are calculated. The results show that the values of PE depend on the earthquake magnitude, the earthquake source depth, and the number of days prior to the earthquake. The PE is larger for earthquakes with greater magnitude and lower depth and for days closer to the earthquakes. The results also show that the occurrence rate of anomaly within several days before the earthquakes is overall larger than that during the background days, especially for the large-magnitude and low-depth earthquakes. These results indicate that the anomalous behavior of TEC within just a few days before the earthquakes is related with the forthcoming earthquakes with high probability.

Received 5 June 2010; accepted 27 December 2010; published 5 February 2011.

Citation: Le, H., J. Y. Liu, and L. Liu (2011), A statistical analysis of ionospheric anomalies before 736 M6.0+ earthquakes during 2002–2010, J. Geophys. Res., 116, A02303, doi:10.1029/2010JA015781.