Abstract
Understanding earthquake precursory phenomena based on ionosphere perturbation is a fairly new field in geoscience today and has achieved promising success. Scientists across the globe are now trying to learn insight about the physical and chemical processes involved in the upper atmosphere and beyond during the earthquake preparatory period. One of such studies is based on global navigation satellite system (GNSS) observations. Global Positioning System (GPS) is currently one of the most popular global navigation satellite positioning systems widely available for such society application. GPS has led to technical revolutions in the field of applications like navigation as well as in upper atmospheric/ionospheric studies. GPS signals from the satellites encountered the ionosphere before it is captured by the receiver on the ground. In this process, the free electrons in the ionosphere affect the propagation of the signals by changing their velocity and direction of travel. A number of recent investigations have suggested that satellites and ground-based facilities like that of GNSS may detect earthquake precursors a few hours or days prior to the main event due to ionospheric perturbations induced by initiation of earthquake process. The typical phenomenological features of ionospheric precursors of strong earthquakes are summarised by Pulinets et al. (2003). The parameter of ionosphere that produces most of the effects on radio signals is the total electron content (TEC). The TEC is defined by the integral of electron density in a 1 metre square column along the signal transmission path. The ionosphere causes GPS signal delays to be proportional to the TEC along the path from the GNSS satellite to a receiver. The TEC measurements obtained from dual frequency GNSS receivers are one of the most important parameters to characterise Earth’s ionosphere. The changes in the Earth’s ionosphere can be used to derive the information about an impending earthquake. Therefore, it is very important to monitor the TEC variation due to tectonic deformation prior to an earthquake and its validation in real-world situation.
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Sharma, G., Champati Ray, P.K., Kannaujiya, S. (2019). Ionospheric Total Electron Content for Earthquake Precursor Detection. In: Navalgund, R., Kumar, A., Nandy, S. (eds) Remote Sensing of Northwest Himalayan Ecosystems. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2128-3_4
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