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Ionospheric electron enhancement preceding the 2011 Tohoku‐Oki earthquake
Author(s) -
Heki Kosuke
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2011gl047908
Subject(s) - tec , ionosphere , geology , seismology , total electron content , geodynamics , anomaly (physics) , global positioning system , geophysics , geodesy , tectonics , physics , telecommunications , condensed matter physics , computer science
The 2011 March 11 Tohoku‐Oki earthquake (M w 9.0) caused vast damages to the country. Large events beneath dense observation networks could bring breakthroughs to seismology and geodynamics, and here I report one such finding. The Japanese dense network of Global Positioning System (GPS) detected clear precursory positive anomaly of ionospheric total electron content (TEC) around the focal region. It started ∼40 minutes before the earthquake and reached nearly ten percent of the background TEC. It lasted until atmospheric waves arrived at the ionosphere. Similar preseismic TEC anomalies, with amplitudes dependent on magnitudes, were seen in the 2010 Chile earthquake (M w 8.8), and possibly in the 2004 Sumatra‐Andaman (M w 9.2) and the 1994 Hokkaido‐Toho‐Oki (M w 8.3) earthquakes, but not in smaller earthquakes.