A Preliminary Study on Ionospheric Scintillation Anomalies Detected Using GNSS-R Data from NASA CYGNSS Mission as Possible Earthquake Precursors

Remote Sensing

Badr-Eddine Boudriki Semlali¹  Adriano Camps¹  Hyuk Park¹  Carlos Molina¹ 

[1] CommSensLab—UPC, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya—BarcelonaTech, 08034 Barcelona, Spain;

关键词: ionospheric scintillation;    GNSS-R;    CYGNSS;    earthquakes;   

DOI  :  10.3390/rs14112555

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Ionospheric perturbations affect the propagation of electromagnetic waves. These perturbations, besides being a problem for space communications, satellite navigation, and Earth observation techniques, could also be used as another Earth observation tool. Several recent studies showed correlations with earthquakes with ionospheric anomalies, but almost all of them use ground stations to measure the Total Electron Content (TEC) variations, and, in particular, the ones occurring after an earthquake. Here, a preliminary study is presented on how the ionospheric scintillation measured with GNSS-R instruments over oceanic regions shows a small, but detectable correlation with the occurrence of earthquakes, which in some cases occurs before the earthquakes. This study uses GNSS-R data from NASA CYGNSS Mission to measure the ionospheric amplitude scintillation ($S_4$) for 6 months from March 2019 to August 2019, applying a statistical analysis based on confusion matrixes, and the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves to correlate $S_4$ anomalous variations to earthquakes. A small positive correlation is found between the ionospheric scintillation and the earthquakes during the six previous days. However, the study has some weakness because (a) a small number (∼45) of large (M > 6) earthquakes over oceanic regions are studied, (b) the region studied is close to the geomagnetic equator, where ionospheric scintillations are usual, and (c) the overall correlation is small.

【 授权许可】

Unknown